Mother tongue to heritage language metamorphosis: the case of Mandarin Chinese in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article compares Mandarin Chinese (MC) proficiencies of bi/multilingual children from immigrant families in Canada (BM) with those of monolingual (bidialectal) children (M) from China across two age groups (5–7 and 10–12). The purpose of the comparison is to identify the threshold of mother tongue to heritage language shift among Canadian bi/multilinguals. The results of bivariate ANOVA analysis of 28 speech parameters in children’s narratives elicited with the help of picture prompts demonstrate significant effects of language and age groups on proficiency parameters as well as interactions between language and age group factors. In the younger age group (5–7), bi/multilinguals proficiency is higher in six parameters, and lower in eight parameters, as compared to monolinguals, i.e., language proficiencies of bi/multilinguals are overall on par with those by monolinguals. By contrast, in the older participant group (10–12), there is a higher number of significant differences between BM and M participants (20 out of 28 parameters), and monolinguals have higher proficiencies in all these parameters. Furthermore, within the language group, cross-age comparisons display a significant improvement in 16 speech parameters for the older monolinguals group as compared to the younger group, but none at all for the bi/multilinguals older versus younger groups. The results suggest that for children from immigrant families in the given location and settings, the threshold of Mandarin Chinese shift from a mother tongue to a heritage language occurs between the ages of 8–9 and is largely completed by the age of 10–12, as evidenced by lack of further development of speech parameters in the 10–12 BM group. These results are explained by the impact of majority language education and other social factors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".