Comparisons across the ages showed the greatest differences across
home language groups at the youngest ages, and subsequent convergence in
performance with age. Thus, at the youngest ages, home language groups
tended to perform differently, according to the level of exposure to the lan-
guage in question. In English, at ages 2–3 and 4–5, Mon E children generally
performed significantly differently from OEH, WEH, and OWH children;
and at age 7–8, whereas OEH children no longer performed differently from
Mon E children, WEH and OWH children still performed less well than the
Mon E children. In Welsh, at ages 4–5 and 7–8 the differences across home
language groups was most apparent, with OEH children most clearly dis-
tinct from OWH children, with the WEH children performing between
these two.
As children got older, the home language groups gradually became less
distinguishable. By ages 13–15, all children in both languages performed in
an equivalent fashion. Thus, early differences across groups became neutral-
ized with age.
Within that general progression, however, it is possible that bilinguals
experienced acceleration in the case of some structures. In order to explore
this possibility, two further sets of analyses were conducted – first, correlat-
ions between the English and Welsh performance were examined; second,
the relative performance of the home language groups at each age on the
individual structures was investigated.
Again, the reasoning with regard to correlations was that if some type of
bootstrapping was occurring, we might expect correlations on the perform-
ance in English and Welsh in cases in which English and Welsh were
74 Part 2: Bilingual Language Development
036912151821242730333639 OEH WEH OWH- OEH 5.09 13.32 25.87 34.00
WEH 5.56 16.85 26.82 34.32
OWH 7.68 18.91 29.58 35.45
2-3 4-5 7-8 13-15Figure 4.2 Performance on Welsh receptive grammar by age and home language