What happened to familial acculturation?

Abstract

Abstract While theoretical work focusing on immigrant language acculturation suggests that both parental and child's understanding of English are needed to measure acculturation, analysts have instead focused on child bilingualism. I develop a measure of familial acculturation and conceptually distinguish it from child bilingualism. I then determine whether several child and parental variables influence these measures differently, which would provide evidence supporting the conceptual distinction. Results show that child bilingualism is indeed independent of familial acculturation. Parental skills and resources significantly affect familial acculturation but not child bilingualism, whereas gender and Latino status affect child bilingualism but not familial acculturation. Additionally, modes of incorporation do not determine either child bilingualism or familial acculturation, suggesting that integrative forces external to the family may have little power to shape the internal workings that generate child or familial language acculturation. Together, these findings imply that researchers should avoid conflating child bilingualism with familial acculturation. Keywords: Assimilationacculturationbilingualismsegmented assimilationlanguage acquisitionmodes of incorporation Notes 1. Familial acculturation and child bilingualism are distinct processes. I will define the former as the rate at which parents and children pick up English skills at the same or different paces, while the latter is defined as the extent to which children hold on to the mother tongue and pick up English skills. My aim however is not to show that a focus on child bilingualism is incorrect, but to demonstrate the results that could be obtained if the literature were to simultaneously focus attention on familial acculturation. 2. Theorists outside of immigration also have various definitions of culture. However, they all appear to agree that culture involves some combination of values, norms, traditions and ideas. 3. There may be other reasons (such as the socializing effects of schools and peer pressure from friends) why differential rates of acculturation among families can occur. I just offer three examples. 4. I omit from the Portes/Rumbaut typology the role of parental/child insertion into co-ethnic communities as well as a focus on selective acculturation. I make these decisions because selective acculturation requires more stringent conceptualization of exactly what the ‘level of insertion into co-ethnic communities’ actually means. 5. This argument does not rule out the possibility that intragenerational (i.e. occurring between older and younger siblings) acculturation is possible. 6. Analysts contributing to the segmented assimilation literature focus a great deal of attention on the effects of group membership or nationality status on language outcomes. While this is a worthwhile endeavour, it is not the focus of analyses here. I leave extensive discussion of group effects for another time. 7. To rule out the possibility that results obtained are driven not by changes in the measurement of the dependent variables but by changes in the sample, I conducted preliminary multivariate analyses (not shown here, but available upon request) to ascertain whether the general pattern of results presented by past work would be obtained even when using my limited sample. I first replicated the results in Portes and Rumbaut (Citation2001) by using their full sample to regress child bilingualism on the limited set of independent variables they use. I then fitted the same model using the limited sample used in this article. Analyses suggest that, in general, the overall pattern of the results from the limited sample mirrors those that would be obtained using all of the data. I am therefore reasonably confident that the sample I use is similar enough to the original authors’ sample to make firm conclusions about the dependent variables. 8. Preliminary correlation analyses suggest that the two measures of familial acculturation are distinct from child bilingualism. None of the correlations between child bilingualism and familial acculturation exceed .10, providing the first bit of evidence that familial acculturation and child bilingualism are separate and distinct concepts.