Resumen de Are parental perceptions of child language skills and language environment reflected in direct bilingual assessment? A study of Polish-Norwegian preschool children

Pernille Hansen, Magdalena Krysztofiak, Magdalena Łuniewska, Martyna Burdach, Katarina Hernæs, Jolanta Kilanowska, Grzegorz Krajewski, Karolina Krupa-Gaweł, Judyta Pacewicz, Mari Sandbakken, Ayla Skorpen, Anna Sara H. Romøren, Ewa Haman, Nina Gram Garmann

• Although multilingualism is common, most available tools for assessing children’s language development are normed on and intended for monolingual populations. This study investigates the language skills of children of Polish parents growing up in Norway, using two tools created for multilingual assessment: a parental report, Parents of Bilingual Children Questionnaire (PaBiQ; Tuller 2015) and a direct assessment of vocabulary, Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT; Haman, Łuniewska, and Pomiechowska 2015). Four hypotheses were tested: (1) that Polish is the dominant language according to CLT and parental report; (2) that CLT scores are higher the older the children and the earlier their onset of contact with the language; (3) that parental judgements are positively associated with CLT scores in the same language; (4) that there are positive associations between the relative bias towards Polish in the children's CLT scores and the children's language environment as measured by parental reports. Analyses of data from 57 children aged 3;1 to 5;11 (36 girls and 21 boys) supported all four hypotheses. The findings indicate that parents may be a reliable source of information about children's language environment and skills, especially if researchers or practitioners are interested in determining the child's dominant language.