Measuring knowledge of multiple word meanings in children with English as a first and an additional language and the relationship to reading comprehension

Abstract

Polysemy, or the property of words having multiple meanings, is a prevalent feature of vocabulary. In this study we validated a new measure of polysemy knowledge for children with English as an additional language (EAL) and a first language (EL1) and examined the relationship between polysemy knowledge and age, language status, and reading comprehension. Participants were 112 British children aged 5 to 6 (n = 61) or 8 to 9 years (n = 51), 37% of whom had EAL (n = 41). Participants completed the new measure of knowledge of polysemes, along with other measures of language, literacy and cognitive ability. The new measure was reliable and valid with EAL and EL1 children. Age and language status predicted children's polyseme knowledge. Polyseme knowledge uniquely contributed to reading comprehension after controlling for age, language status, non-verbal intelligence, time reading in English, and breadth of vocabulary. This research underscores the importance of polysemy for children's linguistic development.

Children's divergent thinking and bilingualism

“…The data was collected as part of a wider study on multilingual children's cognitive capacities (Booton, Hodgkiss, Mathers, & Murphy, 2021). Testing was conducted in a quiet area in the child's school.…”

Receptive and expressive vocabulary development in children learning English as an additional language: Converging evidence from multiple datasets

“…Secondly, although the BPVS and CELF measures are advantageous for their standardisation and reliability, such single-word vocabulary measures are unable to capture the full extent to which a word is known. Other recent work on EAL learners has examined depth of lexical knowledge through the use of verbal definitions (Dixon et al, 2020), idiomatic/figurative language (Hessel & Murphy, 2019), and polyseme knowledge (Booton et al, 2021). This research suggests that EAL children additionally experience challenges in these aspects of vocabulary, although this domain is little researched among this population.…”

“…Particularly, expressive vocabulary measures tap more deeply than receptive measures into depth of word knowledge, and rely on greater encoding speed, mental organisation, and phonological retrieval (Ouellette, 2006). There is some evidence to suggest difficulties of bilingual children in vocabulary depth tasks, and therefore this may be a contributory factor (Booton, Hodgkiss, Mathers & Murphy, 2021;Droop & Verhoeven, 2003;Hessel & Murphy, 2019;Lervåg & Aukrust, 2010; but see Dixon, Thomson &Fricke, 2020 andVermeer, 2001 for contradictory findings). The possession of two lexical labels across languages for the same concept (i.e., 'doublet' vocabulary) may result in competition between phonological representations for selection, thus increasing the cognitive demands of expressive vocabulary tasks.…”

Hands‐On: Investigating the role of physical manipulatives in spatial training

“…Participants completed a vocabulary task assessing their knowledge of homonyms. This task was modified from Booton et al (2022). In each of the 16 trials, participants were shown a target word on the screen and were asked to choose which one of four images represents the word shown.…”