Bilingual Children’s Language Development: The Influence of Parental Strategic Input on Vocabulary Development

Bilingual development of children who grow up in dual language environment is often the biggest concern of their parents. In bilingual families, most children grow up to speak the majority language very well, but some may have problems using the minority language, which is usually their ethnic language. However, there are also some children who managed to master both languages well when they grow up, which leads to the following questions: why do some bilingual children can successfully master two languages, while others can't? What are their differences? And what are their methods? Last but not least, what methods can help children who grow up in a bilingual environment to better develop their bilingual learning? This is the topic to be discussed in this paper. We would record the exposure time of children in two languages, and analyze the data to explore the impact of language exposure time on children's bilingual learning. We would also use Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test to compare the receptive vocabulary size of children in families who use two different types of language learning methods, one is the “one-language-one-parent” method, and the other is the “two-parent-one-language” approach, so as to explore the effectiveness of these two different learning methods for bilingual learning and development. We expected the “two-parents-one-language” method to be more effective. The significance of this study is to help bilingual children to find better ways to learn their two languages. It also provides a reference for parents and educators who are anxious to find suitable learning methods. This study can help them objectively deal with the experimental results and choose more appropriate methods for their children.