Language Acquisition Research Center

Profile Effects in Early Bilingual Language and Literacy

D. Kimbrough Oller et al. — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 15:29:34 PDT

Bilingual children's language and literacy is stronger in some domains than others. Reanalysis of data from a broad-scale study of monolingual English and bilingual Spanish-English learners in Miami provided a clear demonstration of "profile effects," where bilingual children perform at varying levels compared to monolinguals across different test types. The profile effects were strong and consistent across conditions of socioeconomic status, language in the home, and school setting (two way or English immersion). The profile effects indicated comparable performance of bilingual and monolingual children in basic reading tasks, but lower vocabulary scores for the bilinguals in both languages. Other test types showed intermediate scores in bilinguals, again with substantial consistency across groups. These profiles are interpreted as primarily due to the "distributed characteristic" of bilingual lexical knowledge, the tendency for bilingual individuals to know some words in one language but not the other and vice versa.

The comprehension of metaphor by preschool children: Implications for a theory of lexicon

Barbara Zurer Pearson — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 15:29:29 PDT

Comprehension of metaphor in preschoolers was studied through an elicited repetition task. Subjects were 52 children ages 3;0 to 5;2. Repetition performance on metaphors was compared to repetitions of semantically well-formed literal sentences as well as semantically anomalous sentences, all matched for length, vocabulary and sentence structure. Accuracy on literal and metaphoric stimuli were comparable and both were significantly better than performance on anomalous sentences. There were no effects for age or sex. It was shown that the metaphors were not semantically anomalous to the children and that they were processed on a par with literal language. The argument is advanced from a review of the literature that imitation implicates understanding of the material imitated.If metaphor is thus shown to emerge early in the child's linguistic repertory, figurative language, it may be argued, occupies a more central position in linguistic theory than it has been accorded.The implications of this reassessment of the role of figurative language were examined in the framework of the philosophy of language and of computational linguistics, and the argument for a dynamic lexicon was put forward.

Cross-language synonyms in the lexicons of bilingual infants: One language or two?

Barbara Zurer Pearson et al. — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:12:01 PDT

This study tests the widely-cited claim from Volterra & Taeschner (1978), which is reinforced by Clark's Principle of Contrast (1987), that young simultaneous bilingual children reject cross-language synonyms in their earliest lexicons. The rejection of translation equivalents is taken by Volterra & Taeschner as support for the idea that the bilingual child possesses a single-language system which includes elements from both languages. We examine first the accuracy of the empirical claim and then its adequacy as support for the argument that bilingual children do not have independent lexical systems in each language. The vocabularies of 27 developing bilinguals were recorded at varying intervals between ages 0;8 and 2;6 using the MacArthur CDI, a standardized parent report form in English and Spanish. The two single-language vocabularies of each bilingual child were compared to determine how many pairs of translation equivalents (TEs) were reported for each child at different stages of development. TEs were observed for all children but one, with an average of 30% of all words coded in the two languages, both at early stages (in vocabularies of 2-12 words) and later (up to 500 words). Thus, Volterra & Taeschner's empirical claim was not upheld. Further, the number of TEs in the bilinguals' two lexicons was shown to be similar to the number of lexical items which co-occurred in the monolingual lexicons of two different children, as observed in 34 random pairing for between-child comparisons. It remains to be shown, therefore, that the bilinguals' lexicons are not composed of two independent systems at a very early age. Furthermore, the results appear to rule out the operation of a strong principle of contrast across languages in early bilingualism.

Patterns of interaction in the lexical development in two languages of bilingual infants

Barbara Zurer Pearson et al. — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:41:20 PDT

We investigated the extent to which bilingual children follow the same patterns and timetable of lexical development as monolinguals. For a group of 20 simultaneous bilingual (English-Spanish) infants, ages 10 to 30 months, we looked at the patterns of growth in one language in relation to growth in the other and also with respect to growth in both languages combined. The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI), standardized parent report forms in Spanish and English, provided measures of lexical growth in two languages at varying intervals within the age range. We plotted the two single-language measures, as well as Total and Total Conceptual language measures, across time, referenced on a second y-axis to the percent of the child's language environment that each language represented. For a subset of the children, we calculated the percentages of general nominals, social words, and verbs for each language to allow the characterization of the children's learning strategies as "referential" or "expressive" (Nelson, 1973). The rate and pace of development were similar to patterns observed in monolinguals. In addition, the vocabulary spurt was seen to occur in about the same percentage of children as has been observed in groups of monolingual children. The bilinguals differed from one another with respect to the relative independence of one language from the other, including the use of different learning strategies in the two languages by the same child.

Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms

Barbara Zurer Pearson et al. — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:23:04 PDT

This study compares lexical development in a sample of 25 simultaneous bilingual and 35 monolingual children for whom semilongitudinal data were collected between the ages of 8 and 30 months. A standardized parent report form, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (1989), was used to assess the children's receptive and productive vocabulary in English and/or Spanish. A methodology was devised to assess the degree of overlap between the bilingual children's lexical knowledge in one language and their knowledge in the other. Using the measures presented here, there was no statistical basis for concluding that the bilingual children were slower to develop early vocabulary than was the monolingual group. The wide range of vocabulary sizes observed at these ages in normally developing children (Fenson et al. 1991) was observed in these bilingual children as well. The close correspondence of the pattern of the bilinguals' growth in two languages at once to monolinguals' growth in one suggests that norms for lexical development in bilinguals should be made with reference to the children's performance in two languages together.