Developmental changes in maternal education and minimal exposure effects on vocabulary in English- and Spanish-learning toddlers

• By 22 months vocabulary is similar in monolingual and minimally-exposed dual language children.
• Maternal education predicts dominant vocabulary in English, but not Spanish, at 22 months.
• Findings hold for comprehension and production and for direct assessment and parent report.

The current research follows up on two previous findings: that children with minimal dual-language exposure have smaller receptive vocabularies at 16 months of age and that maternal education is a predictor of vocabulary when the dominant language is English but not when it is Spanish. The current study extends this research to 22-month-olds to assess the developmental effects of minimal exposure and maternal education on direct and parent-report measures of vocabulary size. The effects of minimal exposure on vocabulary size are no longer present at 22 months of age, whereas maternal education effects remain but only for English speakers.