Differences in language development between monolingual (Galician) and bilingual (Galician- Spanish) children.

PÉREZ PEREIRA, M.; RESCHES, M.; FERNÁNDEZ, P.

Dubrovnik

Encuentro; Proceedings from the First European Network meeting on the Communicative Development Inventories; 2006

Gävle University Press

Comparisons between monolingual Galician speaking children and bilingual Galician and Spanish speaking children were performed on the different sections of the Galician version of the MacArthur-Bates scales. The total number of subjects between 8 and 30 months of age was 1167. 43% of them lived in families were only Galician was spoken, and 57% came from families were both Spanish and Galician were used. The results found indicate that the bilingual children obtained significantly higher scores than the monolingual ones in the following sections: use of language, regular suffixes, irregular suffixes, MLU of the 3 longest utterances, and sentence complexity. These differences continue to reach significance when controlling the effect of mothers? educational level, excepting for use of language. No other significant difference was found.These results indicate that being exposed to two languages does not have negative effects on language development and may even have a positive effect on the acquisition of language during the age period studied. The bilingual children seem to show an earlier mastering of first grammar than the monolingual children do. The relationships found between measures of vocabulary development and different grammatical development scores of both groups of children are discussed in relation to the language-specific hypothesis formulated by Marchman, Martínez-Sussmann, and Dale (2004). In the present research the comparisons are performed under different conditions, since Galician and Spanish are very close languages, in contrast with the case of Spanish and English.