Language acquisition by a bilingual child Essay

Language acquisition by a bilingual child - Essay Example Of concern to this paper is vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and the impact that various factors have in determining children’s proficiency in their two languages. While little research exists in this area, a few researchers have since conducted research and came up with interesting results on the role these factors play in their children’s language development. It is also very important to compare the bilingual children with those from the monolingual families to see the extent of vocabulary acquisition of the two, though researches have since indicated that the language scores in bilingual children are lower than the scores of those from monolingual homes (Altarriba & Heredia, 2011, p.170). This calls for more studies so as to know the exact factors that contribute to this difference. In their article, Quiroz et al., (2010) summarise their study findings on the impacts of a mother on the learning outcomes of their children, as regards to mastering the vocabularies of the different languages. The study was conducted mainly to examine the various home factors affecting language acquisition of children of 4-5 years old, in bilingual families. Another question of this research involved the impact of the mother-child book sharing activity in bilingual families, and how it compares with that of the monolingual families. Since this study used Latin American kids from families who also used English as their other langiage, it also endeavoured to find out whether the Spanish vocabulary input also impacted the English vocabulary outcomes. The participants of this study were 250 Spanish-Speaking children. Family samples were from three communities living in Maryland and Massachusetts. A comparison sample comprised 150 children drawn from families living in Puerto Rico. The researchers made sure that the children participated came from families where at least Spanish was one of the languages spoken in the