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Description
The PolkaNorski project concerns the development of language skills and world knowledge in Polish-Norwegian multilingual children and their monolingual peers in Poland and Norway. We aim at investigating the relations between children’s language skills, their world knowledge and the features of their linguistic and educational environment. In particular, we focus on the development of vocabulary and knowledge of the living world in children aged 2;0-5;11. The study will include preschool children aged 3;0-5;11, . Raising a child in a multilingual environment can be challenging in many ways and maintaining harmonious bilingual development is crucial for a whole family''s well-being. Therefore the fourth work package (WP4) focuses on evaluating the role of language-oriented intervention that starts even before the child''s birth. For a sample of Polish parents expecting their children in Norway we will provide a workshop and a series of webinars concerning how they can interact with and talk to their newborns. Crucially, in a randomized controlled longitudinal design (with a general development intervention as a control) we will check whether such an intervention provided during the pregnancy may support vocabulary development of a bilingual child at the age of 12, 18 and 24 months. Overall our project will bring new knowledge on complex interplay of familial, educational and cultural in shaping language and world knowledge in children acquiring more than one language.
Summary of project results
One of the effects of mass migration in modern Europe is the increase in the number of multilingual children. An example of children growing up in contact with many languages are children of Polish immigrants in Norway. About 100,000 Poles are currently living in Norway, and almost 20,000 of them are children. Children of Polish parents in Norway often speak Polish at home but use Norwegian to communicate with their social environment outside the family. However, little is known about how Polish-Norwegian children develop in terms of the acquisition of both their two main languages (Polish and Norwegian) and how cultural differences between Poland and Norway affect their development, including their reasoning about the natural world.
Our research concerned the development of Polish-Norwegian children in the domains of language acquisition, including word processing at the neural level and knowledge of the natural world (reasoning about living things). We looked for answers to the following research questions: (1) What are the typical paths of language development in Polish-Norwegian children? (2) To what extent may the development of multilingual children be supported by early training for parents starting during pregnancy? (3) How do the brains of monolingual and multilingual children process words? (4) What is the impact of multilingualism and cultural differences in the educational systems of Poland and Norway on language development and reasoning about living things?
We focused on understanding the relationship between children’s language skills, their word knowledge, and the linguistic, cultural, and educational environments in which they were growing up. As part of four research work packages, we analyzed data from multilingual Polish-Norwegian children and monolingual Polish and Norwegian children aged 18 months to 6 years, their parents and some of their teachers, as well as from Polish parents lining in Norway and expecting their babies (to become bilingual).
Analyses of data from the PolkaNorski project have expanded our understanding of language and cognitive development in children across various linguistic and cultural environments.
The project consisted of a series of studies in which both multilingual Polish-Norwegian and monolingual (Polish and Norwegian) children participated, as well as their parents and some of their teachers. We have engaged with the Polish community in Norway through organisations (Razem = Sammen), Polish religious communities, and Polish individuals, as well as organizing events for the general public (e.g. at Deichmann Tøyen) to recruit participants for our studies. We have also recruited through collaboration with Norwegian kindergartens and teachers in these kindergartens, as well as the parental health information app Nørs.
1) We have compared the vocabulary of multilingual and monolingual children aged 2 to 6, by the use of parental questionnaires and game-like tests on tablets. These studies can inform us about language development in children learning one or more languages as well as be used to create methods for language assessment in multilingual children.
2) We have invited Polish-speaking parents living in Norway and expecting their first child to workshops about bringing up multilingual children with a control group who were invited to a workshop on sleep patterns. Becoming multilingual means that you need a lot of exposure to all of the languages you or your family would like you to speak. These studies can inform us about whether knowledge about multilingualism and parental guidance can have positive outcomes on children’s language development, particularly in multilingual families.
3) We have used risk-free methods, neuroimaging (EEG) and eye-tracking, to record the brain signals and eye movements of 1.5–2-year olds as they listened to words or longer passages to check the impact of multilingualism on the brain processing of language stimuli. These studies can inform us on how language is processed in the brain and whether there are differences between mono- and multilingual children in language processing.
4) We have examined the knowledge of natural world in children 3 to 6 by game-like tasks on tablets to see how they understood living things. These children’s parents and teachers filled in questionnaires about the children’s exposure to nature. These studies can inform us on cultural differences between Poland and Norway, and whether they affect children’s understanding of natural phenomena, e.g. living things?
The project has provided, and will continue to provide, new knowledge about supporting early language development, children''s processing of language, methods of assessing the language skills of mono- and multilingual children, and the relationship between direct experience of nature, and children''s development of concepts related to natural world.
Practical results:
- Characterization of typical development of multilingual children, which is useful for parents and teachers of multilingual children, as well as other practitioners.
- Development of assessment methods for language speech therapists to identify children at risk of developing language disorders, also in multilingual Polish-Norwegian children.
- Development of norms for Polish monolingual children (3-5 years old) for a lexical test.
- Development of tools for Early Childhood Education (ECEC) Teachers to learn more about children’s language environment at home and in their leisure time.
Scientific results:
Our preliminary analyses show that:
- parents following the workshop on supporting early language development acquired knowledge about bringing up multilingual children, and they kept this knowledge for at least 9 months. In the future, we will investigate whether parents'' science-based knowledge can influence children''s language development and whether the workshop on children''s sleep patterns was equally effective.
- Polish children in Norway have Polish skills that are comparable to Polish children living in Poland. We are on our way to finding ways to combine results from reports on these children’s Norwegian and Polish skills to identify language delay.
- Monolingual toddlers look more to the mouth of the speaker than to the eyes, but only when the speaker is speaking a language that is familiar to the child. Looking at the mouth when listening to speech may promote language development.
- Bilingual toddlers do not process words at the neural level in the same way as their monolingual peers. Monolinguals’ brains in our experiment were sensitive to inconsistent word-picture pairings while bilinguals’ were not.
- There are significant differences between Polish and Norwegian kindergartens: Children in Norway stay more outside all year round compared to children in Poland. It also seems like a mature and functional concept of animal emerges earlier in a culture that practices outdoor play. This involves a lot of direct experience with nature and is more popular in Norway than in Poland.
Summary of bilateral results
The bilateral cooperation was satisfactory. The project was well coordinated bewteen two partners'' research teams. Also final conference gathered participants from many countries, which increased internalization of the project. As a result several joint application were submitted for further funding.