How to use a wide variety of words in telling a story with a small vocabulary: cognitive predictors of lexical selection for simultaneous bilingual children

ABSTRACT

Previous research has shown that vocabulary size is a strong predictor of the lexical variety in monolingual children’s stories. Bilingual children often score lower than monolinguals on vocabulary tests so they might produce fewer word types than monolinguals. However, studies have shown that bilingual children can tell stories with equivalent lexical variety to monolinguals. In this study, we tested whether bilingual children’s cognitive flexibility is a better predictor of lexical variety than vocabulary. French-English bilinguals between 4 and 6 years told the story of a cartoon they watched. The bilinguals used just as many word types as age-matched English monolinguals and equivalent numbers in English and French. The lexical variety in bilinguals’ stories was highly related to the costs of mixing trials on a dimensional change card sort task, but not vocabulary. These results suggest that cognitive flexibility can help bilingual children lexicalise concepts.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocabulary
• story-telling
• simultaneous bilingualism
• cognitive advantages
• executive functions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by Discovery Grants to the first author (RGPIN-2018-04978) and to the second author (RGPIN-2016-05980) from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Madeleine Borgeat, Robin Enns, Nathalie Savoie, and Alexandre Zakarian recruited and tested the children.