Pearson, Barbara

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Coordinator, Language Acquisition Lab, Dept. of Linguistics
Last Name
Pearson
First Name
Barbara
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Applied Linguistics
Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education
Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research
First and Second Language Acquisition
Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics
Speech and Hearing Science
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Introduction
My research interests include first and second language acquisition, especially in bilingual populations. I spent 10 years as coordinator of the University of Miami Bilingualism Study Group in Florida, and continue to work and publish in the field from my new homebase in western Massachusetts. At UMass Amherst since 1998, I worked on African American English child speech, as Project Manager for the NIH supported DELV project, under Harry Seymour, P.I. The culmination of that project, the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation tests were published by Harcourt Assessments, Inc. in 2003 and 2005.
I also work part-time in the research area, the Office of Research Development (ORD) where I focus on projects to broaden the impact of science (Broader Impacts) and increase the representation of women and people of color in science and engineering.
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    Cross-language synonyms in the lexicons of bilingual infants: One language or two?
    (1995) Pearson, Barbara Zurer; Fernandez, Sylvia C.; Oller, D.Kimbrough
    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.