Diverse but not different: The lexical skills of two primary age bilingual groups in comparison to monolingual peers

Abstract

Most investigations of bilingual language development focus on children acquiring two European languages. Little research has investigated diverse language pairs or compared the influence of the first language on second language development. The study reported here compared the lexical skills of three groups of 11-year-old students from different language backgrounds. Two bilingual groups (first language Vietnamese or Samoan, second language English) and a monolingual control group matched for social class were compared on a series of tasks. The tasks examined English lexical comprehension and use, as well as single word processing on nonword tasks. The results showed that both bilingual groups performed significantly below their monolingual peers in all lexical tasks but not on nonword tasks. There were no differences between the two bilingual groups, despite the fact that the cultural and linguistic backgrounds of each were very different. The findings indicate that despite six years of formal schooling in English, including focused ESL support, bilingual students from both Vietnamese and Samoan cultural backgrounds perform less well than their peers in their understanding and use of the English lexicon. The implications of these findings for theory of bilingual language acquisition, assessment practice and educational policy are considered.

Conceptual Scoring of Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Measures in Simultaneous and Sequential Bilingual Children

“…Bilingual children have repeatedly been found to score below their monolingual peers (e.g., Ben-Zeev, 1977; Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2010; Hemsley, Holm, & Dodd, 2006; Leseman, 2000) or below monolingual norms (e.g., Fernandez, Pearson, Umbel, Oller, & Molinetmolina, 1992; Mancilla-Martinez et al, 2011; Teoh et al, 2012; Uccelli & Paez, 2007; Uchikoshi, 2006; Umbel, Pearson, Fernandez, & Oller, 1992) on single-language vocabulary measures in one or both of their languages. Oller and colleagues (2007) highlight the distributed nature of lexical knowledge in bilinguals as a key contributor to their lower single-language vocabulary scores when compared to monolinguals.…”

Predicting receptive vocabulary change from childhood to adulthood: A birth cohort study

“…Offspring of mothers from a nonEnglish Speaking Background have been shown to be at increased risk for vocabulary delays in both the LSAC and MUSP cohorts (Harrison & McLeod, 2010;O'Callaghan et al, 1995;Taylor et al, 2013) supporting theories of variation in language development when more than one language is spoken at home (e.g. Hemsley, Holm, & Dodd, 2006). In looking at the influence of maternal mental health in the LSAC cohort, higher levels of psychological wellbeing were protective against vocabulary delays in Harrison and McLeod's (2010) study, with maternal mental health distress serving as a risk factor in Taylor et al (2013).…”

“…As described earlier, the sample was further restricted to monolingual English speaking children, as children with English as a second language are at risk, particularly in the early years, of lower language skills in English due to competing linguistic input, and acquiring English as a second language (Hemsley et al, 2006). …”

Language disorder from infancy to adulthood: predictors and outcomes

“…Offspring of mothers from a nonEnglish Speaking Background (NESB) have been shown to be at increased risk for vocabulary delays in both the LSAC and MUSP cohorts (Harrison & McLeod, 2010;O'Callaghan et al, 1995;Taylor et al, 2013), supporting theories of variation in language development when more than one language is spoken at home (e.g. Hemsley et al, 2006). In looking at the influence of maternal mental health in the LSAC cohort, higher levels of psychological wellbeing were protective against vocabulary delays in the study conducted by Harrison and McLeod (2010), with maternal mental health distress serving as a risk factor in Taylor et al (2013) study.…”

“…This exclusion of children for whom English was an additional language was chosen because language acquisition for multilingual children has been shown to follow a different developmental trajectory to monolingual children (i.e. language knowledge is distributed across at least two languages for multilingual children compared to only one language for monolingual children) (Hemsley, Holm, & Dodd, 2006). Further, the current recommendation is that when determining language competence in children who are multilingual, child performance across both languages should be considered so that assumptions are not made by documenting only part of their linguistic knowledge (O'Toole et al, 2016).…”