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The role of within-language vocabulary size in children's semantic development: evidence from bilingual children*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2012

MARGAUX KEITH  and
ELENA NICOLADIS
MARGAUX KEITH
Affiliation:
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
ELENA NICOLADIS*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
*
Address for correspondence: Elena Nicoladis, University of Albert, Department of Psychology, P217 Biological Sciences Building, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E9, Canada. tel: (780) 492-0124; e-mail: elenan@ualberta.ca
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Abstract

This study tested whether bilingual children show a lag in semantic development (the schematic–categorical shift) relative to monolingual children due to smaller vocabularies within a language. Twenty French–English bilingual and twenty English monolingual children (seven to ten years old) participated in a picture-naming task in English. Their errors were coded for schematic or categorical relations. The bilingual children made more schematic errors than monolinguals, a difference that was accounted for statistically by vocabulary score differences. This result suggests that within-language vocabulary size is one important factor in semantic development and may explain why bilingual children sometimes show a lag relative to monolingual children in one of their languages, perhaps the language in which they have received less formal instruction.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Issue 4 , September 2013 , pp. 873 - 884
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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Footnotes

[*]

Thanks to Stephanie Yan, who spearheaded the data collection for the original study and to the children and parents who participated in this study. This study was funded in part from a grant to the second author from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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