Predicting two Mandarin-English bilingual children’s first 50 words: Effects of frequency and relative exposure in the input

Chan, Wai Han; Nicoladis, Elena

doi:10.1177/1367006910363059

Cited by 17 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Although few studies exist on bilingual children's vocabulary in their ethnic language, common findings indicate that parent language use is very important to development or maintenance of the child's ethnic language (Chan & Nicoladis, 2010;De Houwer, 2007;Lanza, 2001;Pearson, Fernandez, Lewedeg, & Oller, 1997;Wigglesworth & Stavans, 2001). For a child learning two languages with different social status, a lower-status ethnic language is at risk not to be learned or to be later forgotten, especially when the ethnic language receives little attention in school.…”

Section: Parental Language Usementioning

confidence: 99%

Home and community factors influencing bilingual children’s ethnic language vocabulary development

Dixon

Zhao

Quiroz

et al. 2012

International Journal of Bilingualism

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The influence of home and community factors in predicting ethnic or heritage language vocabulary were examined among 282 Singaporean children whose ethnic languages (or mother tongues) were Chinese, Malay, or Tamil, and who were also learning English. The results indicated that (1) parents speaking ethnic language to children had a strong positive effect on children’s ethnic language vocabulary, whereas parents speaking only English had a negative effect; (2) language community had an effect on children’s ethnic language vocabulary, which may reflect community support for the language among the broader community; (3) family income worked differently depending on the language community; and (4) watching television in English mostly/only had a negative effect on children’s ethnic language vocabulary. These findings lend support to other studies among language-minority children indicating that maintaining an ethnic or heritage language requires home support when schooling is through a societally dominant language.

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Section: Parental Language Usementioning

confidence: 99%

Home and community factors influencing bilingual children’s ethnic language vocabulary development

Dixon

Zhao

Quiroz

et al. 2012

International Journal of Bilingualism

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“…Future studies in which changes in motion properties could be detected as readily as changes in object (e.g., manner) could shed further light concerning infants’ default assumption in word‐mapping. Notwithstanding the need to replicate and expend these findings, this study provides additional evidence that the dominance of a given word class in young word learners found in spontaneous speech data might have been confounded by differences in cultural practices, or methodological limitations of parental‐report measures, such as variations in number of items per word category in vocabulary checklists (Chan & Nicoladis, 2010; Salerni, Assanelli, D’Odorico, & Rossi, 2007; Tardif et al., 1999). We believe that controlled experimental procedures similar to the habituation paradigm used in this study might provide the “purest” measures of infants’ default assumption about word referents.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 80%

A Cross-Linguistic Study of Word-Mapping in 18- to 20-Month-Old Infants

Katerelos¹,

Poulin‐Dubois²,

Oshima‐Takane³

2011

Infancy

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This study was designed to examine whether infants acquiring languages that place a differential emphasis on nouns and verbs, focus their attention on motions or objects in the presence of a novel word. An infant-controlled habituation paradigm was used to teach 18-to 20-month-old English-, French-, and Japanese-speaking infants' novel words for events. Infants were habituated to two word-event pairings and then presented with new combinations that involved a familiar word with a new object or motion, or both. Children could map the novel word to both the object and the motion, despite the differential salience of object and motion words in their native language. A control experiment with no label confirmed that both object and motion changes were detectable.Nouns form the majority of children's early vocabulary, and are typically acquired earlier than other word classes (Bates et al.

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“…These data align with a large body of studies that has shown the acquisition of nouns to precede the acquisition of other lexical categories across many languages, with some studies using bilingual participants (cf. Chan & Nicoladis, 2010 , for references to numerous relevant studies).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical and grammatical development in trilingual speakers of isiXhosa, English and Afrikaans

Potgieter

2016

South African Journal of Communication Disorders

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BackgroundThere is a dearth of normative data on linguistic development among child speakers of Southern African languages, especially in the case of the multilingual children who constitute the largest part of this population. This inevitably impacts on the accuracy of developmental assessments of such speakers. Already negative lay opinion on the effect of early multilingualism on language development rates could be exacerbated by the lack of developmental data, ultimately affecting choices regarding home and school language policies.ObjectivesTo establish whether trilinguals necessarily exhibit developmental delay when compared to monolinguals and, if so, whether this delay (1) occurs in terms of both lexical and grammatical development; and (2) in all three the trilinguals’ languages, regardless of input quantity.MethodFocusing on isiXhosa, South African English and Afrikaans, the study involved a comparison of 11 four-year-old developing trilinguals’ acquisition of vocabulary and passive constructions with that of 10 age-matched monolingual speakers of each language.ResultsThe trilinguals proved to be monolingual-like in their lexical development in the language to which, on average, they had been exposed most over time, that is, isiXhosa. No developmental delay was found in the trilinguals’ acquisition of passive constructions, regardless of the language of testing.ConclusionAs previously found for bilingual development, necessarily reduced quantity of exposure does not hinder lexical development in the trilinguals’ input dominant language. The overall lack of delay in their acquisition of the passive is interpreted as possible evidence of cross-linguistic bootstrapping and support for early multilingual exposure.

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Predicting two Mandarin-English bilingual children’s first 50 words: Effects of frequency and relative exposure in the input

Cited by 17 publications

References 53 publications

Home and community factors influencing bilingual children’s ethnic language vocabulary development

Home and community factors influencing bilingual children’s ethnic language vocabulary development

A Cross-Linguistic Study of Word-Mapping in 18- to 20-Month-Old Infants

Lexical and grammatical development in trilingual speakers of isiXhosa, English and Afrikaans

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