Quantifying Language Experience in Bilingual and Trilingual children, 2020-2022

The data in this repository were collected in France, the Netherlands and the UK between 2020 and 2022 to inform the validation of the Q-BEx questionnaire (). Children between the ages of 5 and 9 were tested individually to assess their proficiency in the societal language (i.e., French, Dutch or English), as well as their non-verbal intelligence and working memory. One of their parents or caregivers also filled in the full version of the Q-BEx questionnaire. The respository includes data from 299 children (FR: n=78, NL: n=117, UK: n=104), although some measures are not available for all children. In France, children were recruited in ordinary schools and in private clinics for Speech & Language Therapy (37 children were recruited via clinics). The consent form for schools asked parents if the child had previous or current SLT, and the reason. In the Netherlands, recruitment took place in schools and via social media advertisement. Language disorder (reported by parent/teacher/remedial teacher) was an exclusionary criterion. In the UK, all children were recruited in schools; no exclusionary criteria were applied, and not SLT information was collected. Language experience data Language experience data was collected using the full version of the Q-BEx questionnaire (), which was completed by one of the child’s parents or caregivers. This includes all the following modules (except that Language mixing wasn’t included in France): - Background (languages the child is exposed to, adults and children the child lives with - Risk factors (early language milestones, early parental concerns) - Language exposure and use (current and cumulative estimates; onset of exposure to each language) - Estimates of proficiency in each language (listening, speaking, reading, writing) - Richness of experience in each language (activities, diversity of interlocutors, parental education) - Language mixing - Attitudes The questionnaire was administered either in the societal language (French, Dutch or English) or in one of the child’s home languages (Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish). The choice of administration language was constrained by the translated versions available at the time of testing. The translation protocol used to create the versions in different languages can be found at . Direct outcome measures We collected measures of language and cognitive outcomes during individual, face-to-face sessions with each child (two sessions per child, lasting approximatively 45 minutes each). Most of the testing was done in the child’s school. In France, the children recruited via speech & language therapy clinics were tested in the clinic. In the UK and the NL, some testing sessions took place in a different location (e.g., university premises), and on rare occasions online via Zoom. Language proficiency Outcomes in the societal language (i.e., Dutch, English, or French) include phonology, morphosyntax and vocabulary. Phonology Phonological competence was assessed with the LITMUS Quasi-Universal Non-Word Repetition task. See dos Santos, C., and Ferré, S. (2016) “A Nonword Repetition Task to Assess Bilingual Children’s Phonology”. Language Acquisition 41: 1–14. Morphosyntax Morphosyntax outcomes were assessed with the LITMUS test in each societal language. See Marinis, T. and S. Armon-Lotem (2015). “Sentence Repetition. Methods for assessing multilingual children: disentangling bilingualism from Language Impairment.” in S. Armon-Lotem, J. de Jong and N. Meir, Methods for assessing multilingual children: disentangling bilingualism from Language Impairment. Amsterdam: Multilingual Matters). The English and Dutch versions included 30 items. The French version included 16 items. We created two blocks in the English and Dutch versions so that the first block be comparable to the 16-item French version. Subsequent analyses demonstrated that there was no block effect in EN and NL. For each child, we report three overall scores: Identical Repetitions, Target Repetitions, and Grammatical Attempts. These overall scores correspond to the mean across items (n=30 in English and Dutch; n=16 in French), excluding NAs (i.e., the mean is calculated on the items for which the child did provide a response). Vocabulary Vocabulary breadth was measured in the UK with the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS), in France with the the Échelle de vocabulaire en images Peabody (EVIP), and in the Netherlands with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). Vocabulary depth was measured with the Word Classes component of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals CELF-V (in its Dutch, English, or French version).

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Geographic Coverage:

FR, GB, NL

Temporal Coverage:

2020-01-01/2022-01-01

Resource Type:

dataset

Available in Data Catalogs:

UK Data Service

Topics: