Dynamic Impacts of Personal Social Network on Language Learning Outcomes

Established findings in social network science demonstrate how different aspects of a person’s social network are predictive of a wide range of behaviors and outcomes, including risk tolerance, maintenance of cognitive functioning, and even longevity, testifying to a strong link between humans’ social fabric and their behaviors. Language is the highest and most distinctive human behavior, and it takes a social brain to fully unlock it. Relatedly, the recognition that the makeup of speakers’ networks are powerful predictors of language behavior and language change, has been long recognized, especially in domains like linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. More recently, a social view of language has begun to infuse other subfields of linguistics, such as psycholinguistics, language learning, and bilingualism. Two recent socioecological frameworks of second language acquisition and bilingualism (the Transdisciplinary Framework for Second Language Acquisition in a Multilingual World and the Systems Framework of Bilingualism) provide new insights as they describe not only how variability in linguistic, cognitive and social factors at the individual level may impact language performance, but they also attempt to model the role of the speakers’ interlocutors, environments, and societies’ dynamics as important factors for language outcomes. Crucially however, both frameworks focus on the speaker and their interactions with other individuals within different societal layers, but do not yet capture how compositional and structural characteristics of the speaker’s immediate social network (beyond the speaker self) may shape speakers’ language outcomes.

With the goal to complement these frameworks, we plan to measure the bidirectional synergy between personal social network composition and structure and longitudinal language outcomes. We will focus on Heritage Speakers (HSs) of Spanish as a first testbed to investigate the relationship between personal network composition and structure and language acquisition in general. Starting this research by investigating HSs has also important societal and educational values. While HSs represent the largest and fastest growing bilingual population in the US (i.e., 30% of children and young adults in the US), they also notoriously display large variability in language outcomes in the Heritage language. Importantly, such variability will enable observing correlations between HSs’ social networks characteristics and language outcomes, more so than for speakers’ whose language abilities are more homogeneous. Finally, a large proportion of HSs who enter secondary and college education opt to enroll in Spanish classes for Heritage speakers to gain better formal knowledge of Spanish, making them effectively formal learners of their own native language, and thus a perfect sample to test longitudinal language learning outcomes past childhood.

Research Objective (1): measure if and to what extent compositional and structural features of speakers’ personal social network may predict language outcomes in HSs beyond known measures of individual variability in language use and cognitive abilities.

Research objective (2): extend from Research objective (1) and ask the question of how the correlation between compositional and structural features of the speaker’s personal social network and language outcomes oscillate longitudinally.

Funding Sources: This work is supported by NSF Award No. BCS-2341628.