The role of parental characteristics, home language use, and schooling in children's Mandarin heritage language development in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction This study on child HL (heritage language) speakers of Mandarin examines the associations between parental characteristics (attitudes and proficiency), children's HL use (at home and through schooling), and children's HL outcomes (in vocabulary and simple syntax). Methods Forty-seven Mandarin-English bilingual children of Chinese heritage (mean age: 10.5; age range: 6.8–16.2) residing in Western Canada participated in the study. All children were second-generation immigrants, and received one of three types of schooling. There were 11 children who attended English-only schools ( English school group), 21 who attended English-only schools but also after-school heritage Mandarin classes ( Heritage school group), and 15 who attended English-Mandarin bilingual schools (Bilingual school group). The children were administered two tasks: a picture-naming task targeting Mandarin vocabulary (LITMUS-CLT) and an experimental elicitation task targeting Mandarin wh -interrogative sentences (an early-acquired structure). Parents were administered a questionnaire about home language environment, attitudes toward Mandarin transmission, and their children's schooling choices. Results Results showed that positive parental attitudes and lower parental proficiency in English were associated with more Mandarin use at home. More Mandarin use at home, in turn, was associated with larger vocabularies and more accurate production of interrogatives. By contrast, school type was only associated with vocabulary and not syntax: the Bilingual school group had larger vocabularies than the English school group. Discussion Overall, these results show how parental characteristics may influence input factors, which in turn may differentially affect the acquisition of vocabulary vs. early-acquired syntactic structures.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".