Parental language mixing and its association with language outcomes of children with (a suspicion of) Developmental Language Disorder

Children who grow up multilingually will naturally encounter language mixing in their environment. Since we know that children’s language development depends on the quantity and quality of their language input (Anderson et al., 2021), and processing mixed-language input may be more cognitively demanding than processing single-language input (Morini & Newman, 2019), the frequency with which parents and/or caregivers mix their languages may impact on the language development of their children. This matter is also highly relevant for children with developmental language disorder (DLD), for whom attention to language input is essential. Yet very little is known about language mixing in the input of these children, and the potential consequences for their language development. Although studies of children with typical development suggest that the effect may be small (Bail et al., 2015), the effect could be amplified in children with DLD because of their problems with language uptake/processing (Jackson et al., 2021).

We investigate parental language mixing and its relationship with language outcomes in three- to six-year-old multilingual children with (a suspicion of) DLD in the Netherlands. Parental language mixing is measured through a parental questionnaire (Q-BEx; De Cat et al., 2022) and the LENA™ recording device that is used to make day-long audio recordings in the home environment. We distinguish between the type (between or within speakers) and direction (Dutch to other language or vice versa) of language mixing by parents and explore relationships with children’s receptive and productive vocabulary and grammatical abilities in Dutch.