Ordförrådsutveckling hos arabisk-svensktalande och turkisk-svensktalande barn i förskoleåldern och vid skolstart

Abstract

This paper investigates the receptive and expressive vocabulary skills of 202 Arabic/Swedish-speaking and Turkish/Swedish-speaking bilingual children aged 4-7 growing up in Sweden, in their home/minority language (Arabic, Turkish) and in Swedish. We explore how vocabulary is affected by age, age of onset, socio-economic status (SES), and minority language exposure in the family (via parents) and via home-language (mother tongue) instruction. The comprehension and production of nouns and verbs was assessed with the Arabic, Turkish and Swedish versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs, Haman et al. 2015). Background information was collected via a parental questionnaire. In this cross-sectional study, there was a clear and positive effect of age on receptive and expressive vocabulary scores, though the effect was more pronounced for the majority language Swedish, and less so for the home language. Length of exposure had a positive effect on Swedish scores. For minority language vocabulary, language use in the home played an important role: Children whose parents mostly spoke Arabic or Turkish to them had significantly higher vocabulary scores in Arabic/Turkish than other children. For neither language was there any effect of SES (parental education). These results from a Swedish context complement vocabulary studies of other language combinations and reveal the importance of input for the development of receptive and expressive vocabulary in bilingual children.

Arabic-Swedish-Speaking Children Living in Sweden: Vocabulary Skills in Relation to Age, SES and Language Exposure

“…Other splits, or treating parental education as a continuous variable, did not yield any significant effects either. For space reasons, these statistics are not reported here.5 This question is explored further inBohnacker et al (2021).6 Note that Öztekin put the split at 80%, not at 60%; thus for each language, she compared children with 80% or more of their daily input in one language to all other children(Öztekin, 2019: 112-113). Since very few of our participants received 80% or more of their daily input in one language, we could not test these extremes statistically.7 At higher ages, MTI attendance does have measurable effects on home language vocabulary, as lessons add up year after year and also involve literacy activities(Ganuza & Hedman 2019).…”

12. “Argh, even my kid is digitalised!” Commercial apps’ effect on parent– teacher communication

“…Funnet vitner om en enorm utvikling i andrespråket, og viser at Perle på dette tidspunktet har et balansert tospråklig ordforråd. Det at andrespråket har en sterkere vekst enn førstespråket, er et funn som støtter Bohnacker et al (2021) sin studie fra Sverige, som også finner sterkere vekst i andrespråket enn førstespråket. Ved M3 mangler dessverre produktive testdata fra den norske ordforrådstesten.…”

“…Dette henger sammen med at distribuert tid til språkene og kvalitet i språklig innputt påvirker tilegnelsen (Oller et al, 2007;Unsworth, 2016). I en studie av Bohnacker et al (2021) sammenliknes utviklingen av første-og andrespråket til en gruppe barn i Sverige mellom 4 og 7 år. Studien finner sterkere vekst for andrespråket.…”

“…Studien finner sterkere vekst for andrespråket. Innputt og eksponeringsmengde av svensk ga positiv innvirkning på utviklingen, og bruk av førstespråket hjemme ga positiv effekt på utvikling av førstespråket (Bohnacker et al, 2021). Andre studier finner også en sammenheng mellom mengde innputt i førstespråket og ordtilegnelse på andrespråket (Dijkstra et al, 2016;Pearson et al, 1997;Scheele et al, 2010).…”

Variability and learning in language change: The case of V2

“…A skewed distribution of initial constituents is not unique to German and has been noted for other Germanic languages as well. Bohnacker & Rosén (2008) and Bohnacker & Lindgren (2014) show for spoken and written Swedish that, as in German, subjects are the most frequent clause-initial element while direct objects are the least frequent type. Similar patterns have also been studies (with the notable exception of Winter ( 1961)) relied on a relatively small sample.…”