17/12/2025
Did we just post yesterday about a new publication coming from our lab? We did! Yet, today we have one more! This time, about INTENTIONAL BILINGUALISM.
Intentional bilingualism (IB) refers to a family language model in which parents living in a predominantly monolingual society deliberately introduce an additional home language that they themselves acquired as a second or additional language. We examined whether this model is associated with particular characteristics of children's L1 morphosyntactic development. To address this question, we compared three groups of 5- to 6-year-olds on a Polish Sentence Repetition task: monolingual Polish children in Poland, IB children in Poland (Polish-English), and heritage-language bilingual children living outside Poland (Polish-English or Polish-German), for whom Polish serves as the home language.
Methodologically, we used a 20-item sentence repetition task in Polish, targeting morphosyntactic competence and analyzed performance using a statistical model that accounts for both child-level and item-level variation. Children were age- and gender-matched across groups.
Our findings were straightforward: IB children performed comparably to monolingual peers on Polish morphosyntax, while the heritage-language bilingual group scored lower on average with substantially greater variability.
Within the scope of this sample, we found no evidence that IB is associated with reduced L1 morphosyntactic competence.
We interpret this pattern conservatively: in Poland, introducing an L2 at home may not reduce the amount or continuity of Polish input sufficiently to affect grammatical development, as Polish remains densely available across school, peer interactions, media, and the broader environment. The lower performance in the heritage-language bilingual group likely reflects differences in the quantity, diversity, and consistency of Polish exposure—and potentially socioeconomic factors—rather than any inherent cost of bilingualism per se.
These findings align with broader evidence that language input—in its quantity, quality, and distribution across contexts—shapes developmental outcomes, and that majority versus minority language status fundamentally structures children's opportunities for grammatical practice.
Practically speaking, introducing an additional language need not compromise the first language, yet sustained, rich input in each language remains essential—particularly for home languages in minority contexts, where maintenance rarely occurs without deliberate support.
We do note some limitations: we did not assess children's L2 outcomes, did not directly measure fine-grained exposure patterns, and included children with different societal languages (English vs. German). These parameters define productive directions for future work.
Background: Intentional bilingualism (IB) refers to caregivers’ deliberate, planned introduction of an additional language at home—beyond what community exposur...
