The relationship between input factors and early lexical knowledge in Turkish-German children

ABSTRACT

Lexical development of bilingual children is influenced by a number of input factors. In the present study, early lexical skills of 25-month old children growing up with Turkish and German were assessed. Parents of 92 children filled out a newly developed list for productive Turkish vocabulary, as well as a vocabulary list for German. A parental questionnaire served to examine the quality and quantity of familial and extra-familial language input. The results showed that children who grow up in a predominantly Turkish-speaking environment subsequently have a larger Turkish vocabulary than German vocabulary. More German input within the family was shown to lead to higher vocabulary scores, but not to a reduction of Turkish vocabulary at this age. Factors predicting vocabulary in both languages included parental language quality and quantity, as well as the number of available books and childcare.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual acquisition
• heritage languages
• lexical development
• language dominance
• input

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the participating families for their time and effort in filling out the checklists. Funding for the study was provided by the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, to Tanja Rinker and by the Landesstiftung Baden-Württemberg to Steffi Sachse.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, [T.R.], upon reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Baden-Württemberg Stiftung: [grant number Habilitation Grant awarded to Steffi Sachse]; Zukunftskolleg: [grant number Research Funds allocated to Tanja Rinker].

Notes on contributors

Nora Budde-Spengler

Nora Budde-Spengler has been a research associate since 2008 in different studies about the effectiveness of language training with bilingual children, early diagnosis of language delays in bilingual children and in EEG studies with mono- and bilinguals. She currently works at the ZNL TransferCentre for Neuroscience and Learning, University of Ulm.

Steffi Sachse

Steffi Sachse is professor of developmental psychology with a focus on language development at the University of Education, Heidelberg. Her research interests include early language development and impairments, their diagnosis and further development as well as language intervention within early childhood institutions.

Tanja Rinker

Tanja Rinker is Senior Lecturer at the Department of German Linguistics at the University of Tuebingen and Affiliated Research Fellow at the Department of Linguistics/Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz. Her work focuses on bilingual and multilingual language development as well as language assessment and intervention.