Finding le mot juste: Differences between bilingual and monolingual children's lexical access in comprehension and production*

Abstract

By school age, some bilingual children can score equivalently to monolinguals in receptive vocabulary but still lag in expressive vocabulary. In this study, we test whether bilingual children have greater difficulty with lexical access, as has been reported for adult bilinguals. School-aged French–English bilingual children were given tests of receptive vocabulary and picture naming. The bilingual children's performance was compared to English monolinguals'. We found that bilingual children scored slightly lower on some measures of comprehension and lower on producing the target word. The bilinguals were more likely to correctly identify the target picture even if they had not produced the name. The differences in comprehension but not production could be statistically accounted for by the variation in receptive vocabulary. These results suggest that, school-aged bilinguals can be close to monolinguals in receptive vocabulary but have a harder time accessing the exact word for production. We discuss reasons for this difficulty with lexical access and strategies that children used when they did not produce the target word.

Are there bilingual advantages on nonlinguistic interference tasks? Implications for the plasticity of executive control processes

“…Data that converge on this idea show that bilinguals are also slower on picture-naming tasks (Gollan, Montoya, FennemaNotestine, & Morris, 2005), produce fewer words in verbal fluency tasks (Rosselli, Ardila, Araujo, Weekes, Caracciolo, Padilla, & Ostrosky-Solis, 2000), perform worse on lexical decision tasks (Ransdell & Fischler, 1987), and experience much more difficulty with lexical access, despite sometimes similar receptive vocabulary scores (Gollan & Acenas, 2004;Yan & Nicoladis, 2009;see Bialystok, 2009a, for a review). Importantly, what might unite all of these findings is the idea that a second, task-irrelevant language is interfering with the production of a relevant linguistic response.…”

The Motivational Factors of Heritage Language Learning in Immigrant Bilingualism

“…These bilingual students who know both English and the heritage language have more cognitively developed brains compared to monolinguals. Research suggests that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on pragmatics, metalinguistic abilities, and controlling attention [39]. Moreover, [39] found in their study that bilinguals have more enhanced cognitive ability and mental flexibility.…”

“…Research suggests that bilingual children outperform monolinguals on pragmatics, metalinguistic abilities, and controlling attention [39]. Moreover, [39] found in their study that bilinguals have more enhanced cognitive ability and mental flexibility. Based on research results, we can conclude that with correct testing methods, bilingual students can perform as good as or even better than monolinguals on the academic performance tests.…”

Novel Morpheme Learning in Monolingual and Bilingual Children

“…However, we would argue that this conclusion is premature and is likely to be anchored to the use of expressive measures to index morpheme-learning performance. It is well known that bilingual children tend to make expressive gains in their L2 at a slower pace than receptive gains (e.g., Gibson, Oller, Jarmulowicz, & Ethington, 2012;Gibson, Peña, & Bedore, 2014;Junker & Stockman, 2002;Kan & Kohnert, 2005;Pearson, Fernandez, & Oller, 1993;Yan & Nicoladis, 2009). Therefore, it is highly likely that their ability to apply the newly acquired derivational morpheme to words in their second language expressively is strongly linked to their overall levels of expressive ability in their second language.…”