A longitudinal investigation of the semantic receptive-expressive gap in Spanish-English bilingual children

Majority language vocabulary and nonword repetition skills in children attending minority language immersion education

“…Specifically, reduced language exposure may lead to weaker links between lexical access and phonological representations. These weaker links have been reported for bilingual children in previous studies when tested in their minority L1 or majority L2 (Gibson et al, 2020). However, these effects may not be observed to the same degree in the present study, where the emergent children were coming from predominantly majority L1 English-speaking homes and were tested in their majority home language that they were regularly using outside the school context.…”

“…It seems that for the emergent bilingual children in our study the link between lexical access and phonological representations in the majority language remains strong, especially for nouns, and despite the lack of formal instruction of the majority language in the school setting. This finding differentiates them from other studies with sequential bilingual children tested in their minority L1 or majority L2 where weak links between lexical access and phonological representations have been reported, giving rise to receptive-expressive differences (Gibson et al, 2020;Gollan et al, 2008). At the same time, the six-to-eight-year-old bilingual children in our study exhibited similar performance to the monolingual children in the study, especially in the production task where their performance was not at ceiling (approx.…”

“…For vocabulary, we expected the children in our study to perform overall better on the receptive task compared to the expressive task given the different cognitive demands between production and comprehension and further phonetic and articulatory processes imposed during production (Gibson et al, 2018;Levelt, 2001;Yan & Nicoladis, 2009). Although access of lexical and phonological representations may suffice during comprehension, this is not enough for successful performance during production (Gibson et al, 2020), giving, thus, rise to a discrepancy in performance between the two tasks. We also expected children to perform better on nouns than on verbs given the well-documented differences between the two word classes in their developmental trajectory (Altman et al, 2017;Haman, Wodniecka, et al, 2017;Sheng & McGregor, 2010), because concrete nouns are inherently morphosyntactically simpler, and due to the way objects and actions are depicted in picture-based tasks.…”

“…Reduced language exposure may impact on how strong the links are between lexical access and semantic or phonological representations. This, in turn, may impact on bilingual children's ability to access words in the lexicon during comprehension and, subsequently, produce them (Gibson et al, 2020). When exposure to a language is reduced, as is possible in a bilingual context, the discrepancy between receptive and expressive abilities may also increase (Gibson et al, 2020).…”

Mind the gap: Psycholinguistic and individual factors affecting expressive and receptive vocabulary skills in English-Gaelic bilingual children

“…The examination of the language abilities of children in minority second language (L2) immersion education offers a unique opportunity to investigate the individual factors that affect language development under limited exposure to a minority heritage language and to better understand what psycholinguistic properties may affect bilingual children’s vocabulary performance in this bilingual exposure setting. Our study is also one of the few studies to examine how the receptive–expressive gap changes as a function of schooling (measured by the school year children are in; Gibson et al, 2020; Oller & Eilers, 2002) and, in this case, of minority language immersion education. By focusing on the early years of Gaelic-medium primary education (GMPE), this is the first study to investigate how psycholinguistic variables, such as word class, AoA, and morphophonological complexity, and child-level factors such as age, length, and frequency of exposure to Gaelic and English, modulate vocabulary development and the receptive–expressive gap in the minority language.…”