Language Use of Japanese-English Bilingual Families and Association with Children's Oral Proficiency in Heritage Japanese

Abstract

The maintenance and development of heritage language (HL) has been influenced by various factors surrounding heritage speakers; however, it is unclear what factors could closely impact children’s oral proficiency. In this exploratory study, I examined the relationships between proximal and distal input factors, and children's oral lexical proficiency in the heritage and community language, among Japanese-English speaking bicultural families in the U.S. Twenty-one children from bilingual families in Hawai‘i and Washington completed an oral picture naming task in both Japanese and English (HALA, adapted from O’Grady et al., 2009) and a semi-structured interview about their family language use. Mothers and fathers separately completed an online survey containing questions about the language use and other potential language-related factors. The analysis of the collected data explored their language use consistency among the family members, the association between the language use and the children’s vocabulary proficiency, and the potential differences in factors between the two regions. The results from the children’s and parents' reports indicated consistency in reciprocal language use among parents and children, found positive correlations between the quantity of parental language outputs to their child and children’s oral lexical proficiency. Additionally, no notable differences were found between the two regions in the U.S. besides non-native Japanese parents’ HL use that was promoted with the heritage community’s support.