The roles of early maternal parenting practices and children’s regulation in predicting English vocabulary in Spanish-speaking emerging bilingual children

Abstract

Many children in the United States are growing up in homes with a non-English primary spoken language. Because students must learn and perform in English-language classrooms, understanding early factors and processes involved in developing English vocabulary is critical. With a longitudinal panel model, we examined the prediction of fifth-grade English vocabulary skills from both extrinsic (i.e., mothers’ warmth/responsive parenting) and intrinsic (i.e., self-regulation, Spanish vocabulary skills) factors, controlling for children’s sex, families’ socioeconomic status, and mothers’ English language proficiency among a Spanish-speaking subset of participants (N = 446) in the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project national dataset. Maternal warmth/responsivity assessed during infancy was positively associated with children’s self-regulation in toddlerhood. In turn, self-regulation was positively related to Spanish vocabulary in preschool, which positively predicted fifth-grade English vocabulary skills. Findings indicate that children’s own heritage language and emotionally supportive parenting practices benefit English vocabulary development, through children’s self-regulation skills, in low-income Spanish-speaking emerging bilingual children.