Transcription and Grammaticality of Monolingual and Bilingual Language Samples in Children
Language acquisition in bilingual children is an understudied field. We sought to better understand language acquisition and cognitive processing in this population by collecting and analyzing language samples. The analysis of these samples can offer insight into differences in language development for children who speak more than one language at home as compared to those who are monolingual. One step in this process is transcription. In this project, transcription consisted of typing out what participants said as well as marking mazes, various base word structures and bound morpheme endings. 103 children between the ages of 5 and 8 were asked to tell and retell stories using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). These children were a mixed sample of those who speak Spanish or Vietnamese at home in addition to English and those who only speak English. At this point in the study there are still samples that are in the process of being transcribed, however, some initial data has been collected. These results give information about various measures of language development such as Mean Length of Utterance, Number of Different Words, and Words Per Minute. Through a better understanding of language development in bilingual children we can better serve and represent these populations in the future.