Bilingual families: the mother’s language choices are twice as important

For a child to be bilingual, the mother’s language choices are far more important than the strategy adopted. This is the finding of a Concordia University study of Montreal families.

“In fact, regardless of the strategy used, the mother has twice as much influence on learning as the father,” explains Andrea Sander-Montant, a doctoral student at Concordia’s Childhood Research Laboratory.

Even though there was “not really one strategy that was better than the other strategies for having a balanced quantity of the two languages for the child.”

The “one parent, one language” strategy, which is generally the most recommended, is not necessarily better, according to the results of the study. Sander-Montant is nevertheless surprised that it is rarely used in Montreal families – preferring instead a model where both parents speak both languages.

Generally speaking, children need to communicate at least 25 per cent of the time in each language every day in order to learn it, notes the researcher.

“We observed that none of these strategies gave us any information about what the children were actually hearing at home,” notes Professor Krista Byers-Heinlein of the University’s Department of Psychology and author responsible for supervising the study.

The researchers hypothesise that mothers spend more time with their children, giving them more opportunities to pass on their language. The generally more intimate relationship that mothers traditionally share with their children also plays a role, they believe.

Of the 300 families studied, 60 spoke a language other than French and English at home. Whether or not this language was shared by both parents, the mother’s influence on language learning was even greater in these families.

In addition to the time spent with the child, the study suggests that cultural factors may come into play, including the fact that the transmission of the language is often perceived by mothers as their responsibility.

The data used in the study was collected from parents attending the laboratory for various reasons between 2013 and 2020. They were systematically given a questionnaire, with no specific purpose other than to gather information.

Sander-Montant feels that it would be important to include single-parent families and those with two parents of the same sex in a subsequent study.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews