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Immigrant Parents

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

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Synonyms

Intergenerational language transmission

Definition

Immigrant A person who goes to live permanently in a foreign country.

Bilingualism The practice of speaking or signing in two or more languages, with varying degrees of proficiency. Synonym, multilingualism.

Majority, or Societal Language A language spoken by the majority of the inhabitants of a given region.

Minority, or Heritage Language A language which is not the language of the community, spoken by indigenous peoples or immigrants as part of their cultural heritage, includes the whole range of mastery, from only a few words and incomplete grammar to full fluency.

Introduction

All humans, except victims of heinous child neglect, grow up speaking the language of their caregivers (Pinker 1994; Rhymer 1993). Indeed, given the right circumstances and enough support for it, people become fluent in two or more languages, such that more than half of the world’s population is estimated to be multilingual (Crystal 2004). When...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Barbara Zurer Pearson

Authors
  1. Barbara Zurer Pearson
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Correspondence to Barbara Zurer Pearson .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

  2. Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. University of South Carolina - Beaufort, Bluffton, SC, USA

    Carey Fitzgerald

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Pearson, B.Z. (2018). Immigrant Parents. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2421-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2421-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

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