The effects of bilingual status on lexical comprehension and production in Maltese five-year-old children: A LITMUS-CLT study

ABSTRACT

This article investigates whether the bilingual status of 56 typically developing children aged 60–69 months influenced their lexical abilities. The participants were identified as Maltese-dominant (Me) (n = 21), English-dominant (Em) (n = 15) and balanced bilingual (ME) (n = 20) on the basis of language exposure and proficiency, as reported by their parents. Comprehension and production of nouns and verbs were measured using Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT) in Maltese (CLT-MT) and British English (CLT-EN). Significant effects of bilingual group were identified for performance on lexical comprehension. For production, consistent bilingual group effects resulted when accurate concepts lexicalised in the test language were scored. Lexical mixing was more pronounced when children were tested in their non-dominant language. Maltese noun production elicited the highest levels of mixing across all groups. Findings point towards the need to consider specific exposure dynamics to each language within a single language pair when assessing children’s bilingual lexical skills.

KEYWORDS:

• Expressive
• lexical mixing
• nouns
• receptive
• vocabulary
• verbs

Acknowledgements

This study originated within COST Action IS0804: Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic patterns and the road to assessment (www.bi-sli.org). The authors are grateful to the Heads who consented to their schools’ participation, the teachers who identified potential participants in their classes, the parents who took the time to complete the questionnaires and the children who cheerfully participated in testing.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.