How do mothers' language attitudes relate to their language choice with children? New findings from English-German and Polish-German bilingual families.

It has been accepted for a long time that language related attitudes influence people's linguistic usage and language choice. This is also true for parents in bilingual families. So far it remains unclear how earlier parental impact beliefs and attitudes towards early bilingualism relate to later family language policies, in particular to language choice with young children. This presentation explores this question on the basis of reported survey data from mothers in 75 English-German and 15 Polish-German bilingual families. Recruitment took place when children were in the second year of life. During the recruitment conversation for the much larger longitudinal project this study belongs to, families confirmed that children had heard two languages from birth within the family. Although some fathers contributed data, the present study focuses on mothers. Mothers filled in an online survey querying, amongst others, their impact belief and attitudes to early bilingualism when the target children were 25 months of age. An impact belief refers to a belief that parents can influence their children's language development. When children were around 3.5 years old, and as part of a much larger survey, mothers answered 4 questions about the language(s) they used in response to children's language choice. All questions used a 4-point Likert scale for the answers. Although no longitudinal relations were found, the findings did elucidate the nature of reported maternal beliefs, attitudes and language choice in a relatively large sample, pointing both to generally shared ideas and actions, and to variation amongst mothers. The search for longitudinal links between parental attitudes on the one hand and their language choice practices on the other continues.