Development of cross-language lexical influence: divergence, not convergence

ABSTRACT

Storms, Ameel, and Malt [2015. “Development of Cross-language Lexical Influence.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 18: 529–547] compared the development of naming patterns in monolingual and bilingual children. They concluded that bilinguals' naming patterns in their two languages become increasingly similar with age and are thus converging. In this commentary, we argue that taking into account younger participants' smaller vocabulary and greater variability in names for individual objects changes the paper's conclusions: bilingual naming patterns are found to diverge with age.

KEYWORDS:

• Reliability analysis
• object naming
• lexical development
• lexical organization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Anne White is a doctoral student at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of KU Leuven. She studies the representation of artifact concepts in the context of cross-linguistic comparison and bilingual lexical development.

Barbara C. Malt is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Cognitive Science Program at Lehigh University. She researches word learning and the representation of meaning in first and second languages.

Steven Verheyen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Language and Education of KU Leuven, where he researches the acquisition and assessment of Dutch as a foreign language.

Gert Storms is Full Professor and Vice Dean for Research at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of KU Leuven. His research focusses on formal representations of word meaning in first and second languages.

Notes

1 Corrected correlations, unlike the observed correlations can be larger than 1.

2 These correlations are slightly different from the correlations presented by Storms and colleagues. Here we present correlations that are corrected using the average distribution-based reliability over 10,000 random splits (see Table 1) instead of only one random split, as was the case in Storms, Ameel, and Malt (2015).

Additional information

Funding

AW is a Research Assistant at the Research Foundation Flanders (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek).