Language Distance Moderates the Effect of a Mixed-Language Environment on New-Word Learning for 4-Year-Old Children

Abstract

As bilingual families increase, the phenomenon of language mixing among children in mixed-language environments has gradually attracted academic attention. This study aims to explore the impact of language mixing on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and whether language distance moderates this impact. We recruited two groups of bilingual children, Chinese–English bilinguals and Chinese–Japanese bilinguals, to learn two first-language new words in a monolingual environment and a mixed-language environment, respectively. The results showed that the participants could successfully recognize the novel words in the code-switching sentences. However, when we compared the performance of the two groups of bilingual children, we found that the gaze time proportion of the Chinese–English bilingual children under the code-switching condition was significantly higher than that of the Chinese–Japanese bilingual children, while there was no significant difference under the monolingual condition. This suggests that language mixing has an inhibitory effect on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and that this inhibitory effect is influenced by language distance, that is, the greater the language distance, the stronger the inhibitory effect. This study reveals the negative impact of language mixing on vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children and also implies that there may be some other influencing factors, so more research is needed on different types of bilingual children.