Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT)

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0–6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.

KEYWORDS:

• Lexical development
• cross-linguistic comparison
• basic word classes
• word comprehension
• word production

Acknowledgments

This study is a result of collaboration that took place within the COST Action IS0804 ‘Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistics Patterns and the Road to Assessment’ (www.bi-sli.org).

We would like to express our gratitude to all children who participated in the study as well as their parents and teachers. Our appreciation for help in data collection goes to Rachel Haas (British English), Eeva-Maria Kovalainen, Suvi Sirviö, Heta Toivola and Marika Pirnes (Finnish), and Annegret Klassert, Vanessa Borchers, Sabrina Klostermeier and Henriette Stoll (German).

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Funding

The research presented here was partially supported by Berliner Senate and Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Germany [grant number 01UG1411]; the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme [grant number 223265]; the National Science Centre, Poland [grant number 809/N-COST/2010/0]; Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education [grant number 0046/DIA/2013/42]; Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw [grant number BST2015-1744/4]; Ministry for Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia [grant number 175012]; the Slovak Research and Development Agency [grant number APVV-0410-11]; Harry Crossley Foundation and National Research Foundation of South Africa [grant number 88631]; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain [grant number FFI2014-56968-C4-1-P]; and Åke Wiberg Foundation [grant number H14-0104], Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation (Sweden) [grant number S14-14]. We also acknowledge support from International Visegrad Fund partially enhancing collaboration reported in this article [grant number 21420015]. All pictures used for CLTs are subject of copyright of University of Warsaw (Poland).

Notes

¹ Existing MB-CDI data were compared for Basque, Mandarin Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, American English, British English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, European Spanish, Mexican Spanish and Swedish.

² Albania, Bangladesh, Belize, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Central African Republic, Ghana, Iraq, Jamaica, Macedonia, Mongolia, Montenegro, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

³ Norwegian AoA ratings were obtained through a connected but distinct study, as described and discussed in Lind, Simonsen, Hansen, Holm, and Mevik (2015).

⁴ Note that pictures for the production subtasks are never named by the researcher during the testing procedure. Pictures for the comprehension target words are named by the researcher once in a comprehension prompt (see next section). This asymmetry was inevitable in the construction of the CLT due to the limited number of candidate words. A total of 128 pictures/words were needed in each language, chosen from a set of 299, with strict matching criteria for distractors, which made the selection quite challenging.

⁵ Specifically, the teams using e-versions were interested in word-processing speed for the two word classes assessed in the comprehension and production tasks. Reaction time measurement was not possible with the printed version.

Additional information

Funding

The research presented here was partially supported by Berliner Senate and Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Germany [grant number 01UG1411]; the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme [grant number 223265]; the National Science Centre, Poland [grant number 809/N-COST/2010/0]; Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education [grant number 0046/DIA/2013/42]; Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw [grant number BST2015-1744/4]; Ministry for Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia [grant number 175012]; the Slovak Research and Development Agency [grant number APVV-0410-11]; Harry Crossley Foundation and National Research Foundation of South Africa [grant number 88631]; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain [grant number FFI2014-56968-C4-1-P]; and Åke Wiberg Foundation [grant number H14-0104], Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation (Sweden) [grant number S14-14]. We also acknowledge support from International Visegrad Fund partially enhancing collaboration reported in this article [grant number 21420015]. All pictures used for CLTs are subject of copyright of University of Warsaw (Poland).