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ABSTRACT
This paper compared the vocabulary size of a group of 250 bilinguals aged 24–36 months acquiring six different language pairs using an analogous tool, and attempted to identify factors that influence vocabulary sizes and ultimately place children at risk for language delay. Each research group used adaptations of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories: Words and Sentences and a specially designed developmental and language background questionnaire to gather information on risk factors for language impairment, demographic and language exposure variables. The results showed a wide range in vocabulary development which could be somewhat attributed to mothers’ education status, parental concerns about language development and amount of exposure to the second language. We looked at those children performing below the 10th and above the 90th percentile to determine what factors were related to their vocabulary size. Features of the entire group of lower performing children were fewer than 50 words and the absence of two-word combinations by 24 months, lower levels of parental education and parental concerns about language development. The implications for identifying bilingual children at risk for language impairment as well as the language enrichment that might be needed for young bilinguals are outlined.
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). All authors would like to express their gratitude to other organisations and families who supported this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Ciara O’Toole is a Lecturer in speech and language therapy in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University College Cork, Ireland. Her teaching and research interests are in the area of paediatric communication development and disorders. She has particular interest in bilingual language acquisition and children who are acquiring Irish as a first/second language.
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.
Tina M. Hickey is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology, University College Dublin, and previously was a researcher in the Linguistics Institute of Ireland (ITÉ). She published the first articles on the L1 acquisition of Irish in international journals, and has continued to research the acquisition of Irish as a first and second language, immersion education in the early years, bilingualism and minority languages, and reading in a second language.
Aneta Miekisz was awarded a B.A. in Psychology by the University of Texas at Austin, USA and a M.A. in Psychology by the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is currently working on her Ph.D. research, which focuses on bilingual first language acquisition, at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, where she also teaches on academic difficulties and their assessment.
Ewa Haman holds a Ph.D. in developmental psycholinguistics. Presently she is working at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw. Her research interests include lexical development in monolingual and bilingual children. She is the co-author of a normed vocabulary test for Polish children (OTSR) and co-designer of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT) for bilingual children, currently available in 25 languages (following collaboration within COST Action IS0804 Bi-SLI; http://psychologia.pl/clts/).
Sharon Armon-Lotem is an Associate Professor with the Department of English Literature and Linguistics and the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Centre, 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.
Tanja Rinker is the Director of the Center for Multilingualism and a researcher at the Zukunftskolleg / Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Her work focuses on bilingual and multilingual language development including investigations of phonological and morphosyntactic processing at the neurophysiological level as well as language assessment and intervention.
Odelya Ohana is based at the Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar Ilan University, Israel. She obtained a 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 an English coordinator at Ulpena Omanuiot, Jerusalem and as a pedagogical counsellor at the English Department in Michlalah Jerusalem College.
Christophe dos Santos is an Associate Professor at the Linguistics Department of Université François-Rabelais de Tours in France. He is also a member of "Imagerie et Cerveau" INSERM research unit (U930). His research interests include phonological and lexical development in monolingual and bilingual children, with or without language impairment. He is particularly interested in phonological complexity and its potential effect in lexical acquisition.
Sophie Kern is Director of the Laboratory Dynamics of Language in Lyon, France. Her research expertise is on very early first language development in children from a crosslinguistic perspective. Her work focuses on the influence of input on lexical acquisition.