Decontextualized language production in two languages: An investigation of children's word definition skills in Korean and English

Abstract

This study aimed to identify factors that contribute to bilingual children's decontextualized language production and investigate how schooling experience and bilingualism affect the development of this skill. The word definition skills of seventy Korean-English bilingual children whose first language was Korean, yet who had been schooled in English, were analyzed. The findings indicate that contrary to the results from previous studies, the participants' decontextualized language production was much better in their home language than in their school language, when considering both the formal linguistic structure and the communicative adequacy of their word definitions. In addition, limited cross-language transfer across tasks was present and cross-language contribution was observed only in the children's ability to achieve communicative adequacy, but not in their ability to construct conventional definition syntax. The results are discussed in terms of the linguistic and typological distance between the two languages and the potential effects of language-learning contexts.

Learning Words and Definitions in Two Languages: What Promotes Cross‐Language Transfer?

“…Cross‐language transfer may have been constrained by the minimal structural overlap between Vietnamese and English. This finding replicated the single previous study on word definitions in bilingual children who spoke two unrelated languages (Kang, ). It is also possible that proficiency level may have influenced these results.…”

“…For experimental control, we measured performance on a set of six words that were measured at pre‐ and posttesting but not targeted during training. Control words consisted of concrete nouns, similar to the word definition tasks that have been previously used with school‐age bilingual children (e.g., Kang, ; Ordoñez et al., ). Control words were highly familiar objects across all three languages (i.e., dog, chair, house, clock, bed, and door).…”

“…To our knowledge, there has been one study on word definition skills that involved an unrelated language pair. Kang () examined definitional skills in Korean children, age 5 to 6 years, who were living in Korea and attending a L2 English immersion program. Children were from Korean‐only speaking homes and had received at least 2 years of schooling in English.…”

“…Differences in the degree of cross‐language transfer across studies may have been related to different home and school contexts for language use. In Kang (), Korean was the majority language and the children's L1; children were learning English as a L2 and were exposed to English solely in school. Using each language in separate contexts (e.g., home vs. school) and for highly distinct purposes may have limited cross‐language transfer.…”

Linguistic interdependence of receptive vocabulary skills in emergent bilingual preschool children: Exploring a factor-dependent approach

“…This finding suggests that at these early stages of language learning emergent bilingual children develop oral academic language skills in both L1 and L2 to relatively equal proficiency levels. What is more, bilingual preschool children are able to develop receptive academic skills in L1 in the absence of school tasks that require such language skills (Kang, 2013). The L1 development arises from high levels of L1 input, which can be attributed to the continued usage across generations of the native language within Turkish families in Flanders (Altinkamis & Agirdag, 2014).…”