Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-r7xzm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T07:44:36.819Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Corplum is a core from a plum”: The advantage of bilingual children in the analysis of word meaning from verbal context*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2011

STEFKA H. MARINOVA-TODD*
Affiliation:
Harvard University Graduate School of Education
*
Address for correspondence: School of Audiology and Speech Sciences, The University of British Columbia, 2177 Wesbrook Mall, Friedman Bldg., Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z3, Canadastefka@audiospeech.ubc.ca

Abstract

The possible advantage of bilingual children over monolinguals in analyzing word meanings from verbal context was examined. The subjects were 40 third-grade children (20 bilingual and 20 monolingual) recruited from independent schools in the USA. The two groups of participants were compared on their performance on a standardized test of receptive vocabulary and an experimental measure of word meanings, the Word–Context Test. Results revealed that on average, the bilingual children had smaller vocabularies in English. The bilinguals deduced the meaning from context of more words than the monolingual children, although there were no differences between groups on the rate of reaching the target meanings for words on which they were successful, and on the quality of their definitions. Moreover, bilingual children approached the task differently and they showed greater flexibility when analyzing word meanings from verbal context, thus indicating that bilinguals may be more efficient vocabulary learners than monolinguals.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The author's special thanks go to the children who participated in this study. I am grateful to the parents and teachers who made it possible to work with the children. I would also like to acknowledge Catherine E. Snow, Barbara Alexander Pan, Judith Frommer and Yuuko Uchikoshi, who commented on earlier versions of this paper, and the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback. I also thank Meredith Rowe for helping with the reliability assessment and Cheryl Dressler in assisting when identifying schools for this project.

References

Ben-Zeev, S. (1977). The influence of bilingualism on cognitive strategy and cognitive development. Child Development, 48, 10091018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E. (1986). Children's concept of word. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 15, 1332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E. (1988). Levels of bilingualism and levels of linguistic awareness. Developmental Psychology, 24, 560567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E. (1997). Effects of bilingualism and biliteracy on children's emerging concepts of print. Developmental Psychology, 33, 429440.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E., & Majumder, S. (1998). The relationship between bilingualism and the development of cognitive processes in problem-solving. Applied Psycholinguistics, 19, 6985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloom, L. (1973). One word at a time: The use of single-word utterances before syntax. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Bruck, M., & Genesee, F. (1995). Phonological awareness in young second language learners. Journal of Child Language, 22, 307324.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Byers-Heinlein, K., & Werker, J. F. (2009). Monolingual, bilingual, trilingual: Infants’ language experience influences the development of a word-learning heuristic. Developmental Science, 12, 815823.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Campbell, R., & Sais, E. (1995). Accelerated metalinguistic (phonological) awareness in bilingual children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 13, 6168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlisle, J., Beeman, M., Davis, L., & Sphraim, G. (1999). Relationship of metalinguistic capabilities and reading achievement for children who are becoming bilingual. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 459478CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cazden, C. (1976). Play with language and meta-linguistic awareness. In Bruner, J., Jolly, A. & Sylvia, K. (eds.), Play: Its role in development and evolution. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Cummins, J. (1978). Bilingualism and the development of metalinguistic awareness. Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology, 9, 131149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davidson, D., Jergovic, D., Imami, Z., & Theodos, V. (1997). Monolingual and bilingual children's use of the mutual exclusivity constraint. Journal of Child Language, 24, 324.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davidson, D., & Tell, D. (2005). Monolingual and bilingual children's use of mutual exclusivity in the naming of whole objects. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 92, 2545.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dromi, E. (1987). Early lexical development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dunn, L. M., & Dunn, L. M. (1981). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test – Revised. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.Google Scholar
Edwards, D., & Christophersen, H. (1988). Bilingualism, literacy and meta-linguistic awareness in preschool children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 6, 235244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galambos, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1990). The effects of learning two languages on levels of metalinguistic awareness. Cognition, 34, 156.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Galambos, S., & Hakuta, K. (1988). Subject-specific and task-specific characteristics of metalinguistic awareness in bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 141162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition, 1, 355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hakuta, K., & Diaz, R. (1985). The relationship between degree of bilingualism and cognitive ability: A critical discussion and some new longitudinal data. In Nelson, K. E. (ed.), Children's language (vol. 5), pp. 319344. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ianco-Worrall, A. D. (1972). Bilingualism and cognitive development. Child Development, 43, 13901400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaushanskaya, M., & Marian, V. (2009). Bilingualism reduces native-language interference during novel-word learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35, 829835.Google ScholarPubMed
Kovacs, A. M., & Mehler, J. (2009). Flexible learning of multiple speech structures in bilingual infants. Science, 325, 611612.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leopold, W. F. (1961). Patterning in children's language learning. In Saporta, S. (ed.), Psycholinguistics, pp. 350358. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Marinova-Todd, S. H., Zhao, J., & Bernhardt, B. (2010). Phonological awareness skills in the two languages of Mandarin–English bilingual children. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 24, 387400.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Markman, E. M. (1992). Constraints on word learning: speculations about their nature, origins, and domain specificity. In Gunna, M. R. & Maratsos, M. (eds.), The Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, pp. 59101. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Markman, E. M., & Wachtel, G. F. (1988). Children's use of mutual exclusivity to constrain the meanings of words. Cognitive Psychology, 20, 121157.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Merriman, W. E., & Bowman, L. L. (1989). The mutual exclusivity bias in children's word learning (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 54 (3–4), Serial No. 220).Google Scholar
Nagy, W., & Herman, P. (1987). Breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge: Implications for acquisition and instruction. In McKeown, M. & Curtis, M. (eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition, pp. 1935. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Nicoladis, E., & Genesee, F. (1996). Word awareness in second language learners and bilingual children. Language Awareness, 5, 8090.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicoladis, E., & Genesee, F. (1997). Language development in preschool bilingual children. Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology, 21, 258270.Google Scholar
Oller, D. K., & Eilers, R. E. (2002). Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oller, D. K., Pearson, B. Z., & Cobo-Lewis, A. B. (2007). Profile effects in early bilingual language and literacy. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 191230.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Papagno, C., & Vallar, G. (1995). Verbal short-term memory and vocabulary learning in polyglots. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 48, 98107.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Peal, E., & Lambert, W. (1962). The relation of bilingualism to intelligence. Psychological Monographs, 76, 123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearson, B. Z., Fernandez, S. C., & Oller, D. K. (1993). Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms. Language Learning, 43, 93120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Proctor, C. P., Carlo, M. S., August, D., & Snow, C. E. (2005). Native Spanish-speaking children reading in English: Toward a model of comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 246256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ricciardelli, A. L. (1992). Bilingualism and cognitive development in relation to Threshold theory. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 21, 301316.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosenblum, T., & Pinker, S. A. (1983). Word magic revisited: Monolingual and bilingual children's understanding of the word–object relationship. Child Development, 54, 773780.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rubin, H., & Turner, A. (1989). Linguistic awareness skills in grade one children in a French immersion setting. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 1, 7386.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slobin, D. (1978). A case study of early language awareness of a bilingual. In Sinclair, A., Jarvella, R. J. & Levelt, W. J. M. (eds.), The child's conception of language, pp. 4554. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snow, C., Burns, M., & Griffin, P. (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.Google Scholar
Van Hell, J. G., & Mahn, A. C. (1997). Keyword mnemonics versus rote rehearsal: Learning concrete and abstract foreign words by experienced and inexperienced learners. Language Learning, 47, 507546.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Werker, J. F., & Byers-Heinlein, K. (2008). Bilingualism in infancy: First steps in perception and comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 144151.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Werner, H., & Kaplan, E. (1950a). Development of word meaning through verbal context: An experimental study. The Journal of Psychology, 29, 251257.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Werner, H., & Kaplan, E. (1950b). The acquisition of word meanings: A developmental study (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 15 (1), Serial No. 51). Evanston, IL: Child Development Publications of the Society for Research in Child Development, Northwestern University.Google Scholar
Yelland, G., Pollard, J., & Mercuri, A. (1993). The metalinguistic benefits of limited contact with a second language. Applied Psycholinguistics, 14, 423444.CrossRefGoogle Scholar