Project Summary/Abstract
There is a fundamental gap in our understanding of language development in linguistically and culturally diverse
preschoolers, including those who are dual language learners of English and another language. In order to
identify atypical patterns of language development in bilingual children, there first needs to be an understanding
of the typical variation in communication that naturally exists across languages in bilinguals. The objective of the
proposed work is to examine whether bilingual mothers and their young children interact differently in each of
their two languages. The central hypothesis is that there are unique culture-specific communicative norms that
manifest differently depending upon which of a bilingual's two languages is being spoken at any given time.
Using Thai as a test case because of the availability of monolingual comparison data, and building on cross-
cultural findings that monolingual Thai and monolingual American-English mother-child dyads differ in their
communicative styles, the proposed research has three Specific Aims: 1) examine whether Thai-English bilingual
children communicate with their mothers differently in their two languages, 2) examine whether Thai-English
bilingual mothers communicate with their children differently in their two languages, and 3) examine the
relationship between maternal and child patterns of conversation in their two languages. Four naturalistic,
culturally-, and ecologically-valid tasks are utilized: prompted reminiscing, book sharing, toy play, and child
personal narrative. This is the first systematic study to examine whether bilingual mothers and their young
children interact differently in their two languages and in different communicative settings and is innovative in its
scope and approach. Upon study completion, the collected data will be made publicly available to other
researchers as de-identified transcripts via a free repository for further study. This research contributes to
understanding the consequences of bilingualism for linguistic, cognitive, and social development of children
growing up with two languages, specifically how learning more than one language influences interpersonal
communication and interactions during the preschool years. The project carries practical implications for clinical
assessment, treatment, and education of linguistically and culturally diverse bilingual preschoolers and will help
minimize the risk of misdiagnosing differences as disorders in non-WEIRD (white, educated, industrialized, rich,
and democratic) populations.