Bilingual vocabulary production in young children receiving Maltese-dominant exposure: individual differences and the influence of demographic and language exposure factors

ABSTRACT

This study explored individual variability in the bilingual vocabularies of 65 Maltese children aged 23–27 months (N = 33) and 30–34 months (N = 32). Most of the participants’ direct input consisted of Maltese sentences embedding English words. Bilingualism was present at the societal level. Word production was measured through parental report, using a bilingual adaptation of the vocabulary checklist in the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. The participants’ composite and single-language vocabulary measures were examined for central tendencies and age effects, together with individual usage of Maltese and English words. The study also investigated how demographic and language exposure factors, documented through parental questionnaire responses, accounted for individual differences in participants’ vocabularies. Proportionally adjusted single-language scores showed 61.54% of children to use fewer Maltese words than expected. Maternal education level emerged as a significant predictor of Total Vocabulary and Maltese word scores, but explained very little of the variance for each. Frequency of English language exposure in main caregiver input and age group emerged as factors explaining 30.5% of the variance in English vocabulary scores. Maternal education level and frequency of English exposure may therefore act as protective factors in the vocabulary development of children receiving Maltese-dominant exposure.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual vocabulary production
• CDI
• parental report
• variability
• maternal education
• language exposure

Acknowledgements

This study was designed within COST Action IS0804: Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment (www.bi-sli.org). The author is grateful to the mothers who took the time to complete the vocabulary checklists and questionnaires. Special thanks go to Tiziana Baldacchino, Rebecca Pia Formosa, Martina Galdes, Martha Pace and Sarah Vella who assisted in preparing and mailing the document packs. The author would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniela Gatt is a senior lecturer with the Department of Communication Therapy, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Malta. Her primary research interest lies in bilingual language acquisition. She is particularly interested in the lexical-semantic abilities of typically developing children and children with language impairment who receive exposure to more than one language.