A CDI study of bilingual English-Hebrew children – frequency of exposure as a major source of variation

ABSTRACT

The present study explores the vocabulary development of bilingual children when neither of their languages has a minority language status. With both languages having high relative prestige, it is possible to address the impact of exposure variables: age of onset, length of exposure, and frequency of exposure (FoE) to both languages. Parents of 40 English-Hebrew bilingual children, from mid–high socio-economic status, completed the vocabulary checklist of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) [Fenson et al. 1991. MacArthur-Bates CDI Words and Sentences. Baltimore, MD: Brookes Publishing], its Hebrew adaptation [Maital et al. 2000. “The Hebrew CDI: Language Specific Properties and Cross-Linguistic Generalizations.” Journal of Child Language 27: 43–67], and a background questionnaire. Two-thirds of the children showed balanced bilingualism, reflecting the relatively higher prestige of the two languages. FoE emerged as the major exposure variable, other than chronological age that contributes to the maintenance of L1 and acquisition of L2 by bilinguals who are dominant in one of their languages. Analysis of individual data shows how using a bilingual CDI can help identify children who are at risk for Specific Language Impairment, testing both languages and generating provisional bilingual norms, or using conceptual vocabulary with monolingual norms.

KEYWORDS:

• Simultaneous bilingualism
• vocabulary acquisition
• frequency of exposure
• parental questionnaires

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Acknowledgements

This research benefited from the work of COST Action IS0804 ‘Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistics Patterns and the Road to Assessment’ (www.bi-sli.org) and used the research design developed within Working Group 3 by Daniel Gatt and Ciara O'Toole.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sharon Armon-Lotem is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics and the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her research interests are in language acquisition by monolingual and bilingual children with and without Specific Language Impairment (SLI). She is particularly interested in linguistic features which can disentangle bilingualism and SLI, with a focus on syntax and its interfaces with morphology and semantics, and in the impact of internal and external variance on success in child second language acquisition.

Odelya Ohana works in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She has an M.A. in Linguistics (Cum Laude) from Bar-Ilan University. Her thesis focused on ‘Using Parental Reports to Assess the Language Development of English-Hebrew Bilingual Children Ages 2–3’. She works as English coordinator at Ulpena Omanuiot, Jerusalem, and as a pedagogical counselor at the English Department in Michlalah Jerusalem College.