Advances in the Study of Bilingualism

showed the age of acquisition of Spanish or Welsh to be similar across the
two communities in that the majority of our participants started learning
the language at two years of age (91% of Spanish-English and 83% of Welsh-
English participants). The difference between the two groups was not sig-
nificant (χ^2 = 4.07, df = 4, p > 0.4).

Age of acquisition of English
The age of acquisition of English, varied across ages in a different way
for both language pairs, as seen in Figure 6.2 (χ^2 = 19.06, df = 4, p < 0.001).
As there are more Spanish-English than Welsh-English speakers who
acquired English in secondary school or as adults, as shown in Figure 6.2,
we can see that the Spanish-English speakers tended to acquire English
later than the Welsh-English speakers. We may also note that whereas all
the Welsh-English speakers acquired their English in an English-speaking
environment (both English and Welsh are spoken in Wales, and there are
many monolingual English speakers), some of the Spanish-English speakers
spent some of their early years outside the USA, in a Spanish-speaking
country, and so may not have had substantial exposure to native English
speakers before the date of their immigration. Oller and Eilers (2002: 35)
report furthermore that Spanish-speaking children in Miami tend to lack
exposure to monolingual English-speaking peers. This may be illustrated
by referring to Table 6.3, where we can see that there is a difference
between the two speakers AME and CAR in this respect. Whereas CAR
was born in the USA and thus had exposure to English at an early age,
AME did not arrive in the USA until the age of 19. Given that age of acqui-
sition is often related to language competence (Coppieters, 1987; Newport,
1990) we might predict that speakers in Wales would use more English ML
in bilingual clauses than speakers in Miami. But Figure 6.1 shows the

130 Part 3: Bilingual Language Use

28%

19%

29%

11%

13%

36%

25%

32%

7%

1%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

2yrs 4yrs Primary school Secondary

school

Adult

Sp-Eng

Wel-Eng

Figure 6.2 Age of acquisition of English for the Spanish-English and Welsh-English
corpora