Validating the psycholinguistic aspects of LITMUS-CLT: Evidence from Polish and Norwegian

ABSTRACT

The novel assessment tool Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT) aims for comparable cross-linguistic assessment of multilingual children’s lexical skills by basing each language version on two language-specific variables: age of acquisition (AoA) and complexity index (CI), a novel measure related to phonology, morphology, exposure and etymology. This article investigates the validity of this methodology, asking whether the underlying properties are robust predictors of children’s performance. The Polish and Norwegian CLTs were used to assess 32 bilingual Polish–Norwegian, 34 monolingual Norwegian and 36 monolingual Polish children. The effects of AoA and CI were contrasted with frequency in child directed speech (CDS) and imageability, two known predictors of lexical development. AoA was a reliable predictor of performance within all parts of CLT, in contrast to CI. Apart from AoA, only exposure and CDS frequency had a significant effect within both monolinguals and bilinguals. These results indicate that CLT assesses lexical skills in a cross-linguistically comparable manner, but suggest a revision of the CI measure.

KEYWORDS:

• Age of acquisition
• bilingual assessment
• CLT
• imageability
• lexicon
• minority language

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank all the participants, their parents and day-care centre employees for taking part in the study; Elisabeth Holm, Katarzyna Chyl, Ingeborg Ribu and Stefan Markiewicz for data collection and coding; Ewa Wapinska and Emilia Dymarczyk for their contributions to the data collection from bilinguals; members of COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistics Patterns and the Road to Assessment (www.bi-sli.org) for discussions on the development of CLT and preliminary results from this study; Yeşim Sevinç and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on the article.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Funding

This study was partially supported by the following institutions: National Science Centre (Poland; Grant No. 809/N-COST/2010/0); Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (contract no. 0046/DIA/2013/42); Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme (project number 223265); and the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) through its funding of Short-Term Scientific Missions (ECOST-STSM-IS0804-121112-023461). All pictures used for CLTs are subject of copyright of University of Warsaw (Poland).

Notes

¹ For Norwegian, the instructions were essentially the same, but the design was slightly different, as the study was a part of the preparations for the database Norwegian Words. The procedure is presented in Lind, Simonsen, Hansen, Holm, and Mevik (2015).

² PABIQ is in part based on the ALEQ (Paradis, 2011) and the ALDeQ (Paradis, Emmerzael, & Duncan, 2010).

³ The line between correct and erroneous responses in the production tasks is slightly different in analyses of individual children’s performance on the tasks. Here, synonyms and regional variants may count as correct responses.

⁴ The cross-linguistic comparability of CLT results across a wide variety of languages is discussed by Haman, Łuniewska, Hansen, et al. (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This study was partially supported by the following institutions: National Science Centre (Poland; Grant No. 809/N-COST/2010/0); Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (contract no. 0046/DIA/2013/42); Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme (project number 223265); and the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) through its funding of Short-Term Scientific Missions (ECOST-STSM-IS0804-121112-023461). All pictures used for CLTs are subject of copyright of University of Warsaw (Poland).