Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T07:38:50.978Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2009

STEPHANIE YAN  and
ELENA NICOLADIS
STEPHANIE YAN
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
ELENA NICOLADIS*
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
*
Address for correspondence: Elena Nicoladis, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, P2-17 Biological Sciences Building, Edmonton AB, T6G 2E9, Canada elenan@ualberta.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , July 2009 , pp. 323 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This study was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant to the second author and the Roger S. Smith Undergraduate Student Researcher Award to the first author. Geoff Hollis designed the computer program to present pictures to children in random order. We would like to thank Ne Chi Lin Ko, Richard Landry, and Stéphanie Turcotte for helping test the children. The Conseil scolaire Centre-Nord allowed us to recruit bilingual children in the French schools. Thanks to all the children and their parents. Paula Marentette and anonymous reviewers gave us useful feedback on an earlier version.

References

Berguno, G. & Bowler, D. M. (2004). Communicative interactions, knowledge of a second language, and theory of mind in young children. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 165, 293–309.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E. (1988). Levels of bilingualism and levels of metalinguistic awareness. Developmental Psychology, 24, 560–567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E. & Martin, M. M. (2004). Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: Evidence from the dimensional change card sort task. Developmental Science, 7, 325–339.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bloom, P. (2000). How children learn the meanings of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burke, D. M., MacKay, D. G., Worthley, J. S. & Wade, E. (1991). On the tip of the tongue: What causes word finding failures in young and older adults? Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 542–579.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Hecht, B. F. (1983). Comprehension, production, and language acquisition. Annual Review of Psychology, 34, 325–349.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comeau, L., Genesee, F. & Mendelson, M. (2007). Bilingual children's repairs of breakdowns in communication. Journal of Child Language, 34, 159–174.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Costa, A. (2004). Speech production in bilinguals. In Bhatia, T. K. & Ritchie, W. C. (eds.), The handbook of bilingualism, pp. 201–223. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cromdal, J. (1999). Childhood bilingualism and metalinguistic skills: Analysis and control in young Swedish–English bilinguals. Applied Psycholingistics, 20, 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Houwer, A. (1990). The acquisition of two languages from birth: A case study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doyle, A.-B., Champagne, M. & Segalowitz, N. (1978). Some issues in the assessment of linguistic consequences of early bilingualism. In Paradis, M. (ed.), Aspects of bilingualism, pp. 13–20. Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press.Google Scholar
Dunn, L. M. & Dunn, L. M. (1997). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (3rd edn.). Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.Google Scholar
Dunn, L. M., Thériault, C. M. & Dunn, L. M. (1993). Échelle de vocabulaire en images Peabody. Circle Pines, MN: American Guidance Service.Google Scholar
Elbers, L. (1985). A tip-of-the-tongue experience at age two? Journal of Child Language, 12, 353–365.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Faust, M., Dimitrovsky, L. & Davidi, S. (1997). Naming difficulties in language-disabled children: Preliminary findings with the application of the tip-of-the-tongue paradigm. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 40, 1026–1037.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferreira, V. S. & Dell, G. S. (2000). Effect of ambiguity and lexical availability on syntactic and lexical production. Cognitive Psychology, 40, 296–340.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Finkbeiner, M., Gollan, T. H. & Caramazza, A. (2006). Lexical access in bilingual speakers: What's the (hard) problem? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 153–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frick-Horbury, D. & Guttentag, R. (1998). The effects of restricting hand gesture production on lexical retrieval and free recall. American Journal of Psychology, 111, 43–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fromkin, V. A. (1987). The lexicon: Evidence from acquired dyslexia. Language, 63, 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galambos, S. J. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1990). The effects of learning two languages on levels of metalinguistic awareness. Cognition, 34, 1–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gathercole, V. C. M. & Hoff, E. (2007). Input and the acquisition of language: Three questions. In Hoff & Shatz (eds.), pp. 107–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genesee, F. (2001). Bilingual first language acquisition: Exploring the limits of the language faculty. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 21, 153–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Genesee, F. & Nicoladis, E. (2007). Bilingual first language acquisition. In Hoff & Shatz (eds.), pp. 324–342.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
German, D. J. & Newman, R. S. (2004). The impact of lexical factors on children's word-finding errors. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 47, 624–636.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goetz, P. J. (2003). The effects of bilingualism on theory of mind development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 1–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gollan, T. H. & Acenas, L.-A. R. (2004). What is a TOT? Cognate and translation effect on tip-of-the-tongue states in Spanish–English and Tagalog–English bilinguals. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory, and Cognition, 30, 246–269.Google ScholarPubMed
Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I. & Bonanni, M. P. (2005). Proper names get stuck on bilingual and monolingual speakers’ tip of the tongue equally often. Neuropsychology, 19, 278–287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gollan, T. H. & Brown, A. S. (2006). From tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) data to theoretical implications in two steps: When more TOTs means better retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 135, 462–483.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gollan, T. H., Montoya, R. I., Cera, C. & Sandoval, T. C. (2008). More use almost always means a smaller frequency effect: Aging, bilingualism and the weaker links hypothesis. Journal of Memory and Language, 58, 787–814.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, F. (2001). The bilingual's language modes. In Nicol, J. L. (ed.), One mind, two languages: Bilingual language processing, pp. 1–22. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Harris, M., Yeeles, C., Chasin, J. & Oakley, Y. (1995). Symmetries and asymmetries in early lexical comprehension and production. Journal of Child Language, 22, 1–18.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hoff, E. & Shatz, M. (eds.) (2007). Handbook of language development. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Jones, G. V. (1989). Back to Woodworth: Role of interlopers in the tip of the tongue phenomenon. Memory & Cognition, 17, 69–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jones, G. V. & Langford, S. (1987). Phonological blocking in the tip of the tongue state. Cognition, 26, 115–122.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Junker, D. A. & Stockman, I. J. (2002). Expressive vocabulary of German–English bilingual toddlers. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 11, 381–394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, M. W. & Williams, J. N. (2001). Lexical access in spoken word production by bilinguals: Evidence from the semantic competitor priming paradigm. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4, 233–248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahon, B. Z., Costa, A., Peterson, R., Vargas, K. A. & Caramazza, A. (2007). Lexical selection is not by competition: A reinterpretation of semantic interference and facilitation effects in the picture–word interference paradigm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 503–535.Google Scholar
Nicoladis, E. (2003). Cross-linguistic transfer in deverbal compounds of preschool bilinguals children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 17–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicoladis, E. (2006). Cross-linguistic transfer in adjective–noun strings by preschool bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 15–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicoladis, E. & Genesee, F. (1996). Word awareness in second language learners and bilingual children. Language Awareness, 5, 80–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicoladis, E., Pika, S. & Marentette, P. in press. Do French–English bilingual children gesture more than monolingual children? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.Google Scholar
Oller, D. K., Pearson, B. Z. & Cobo-Lewis, A. B. (2007). Profile effects in early bilingual language and literacy. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 191–230.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Pearson, B. Z. (1998). Assessing lexical development in bilingual babies and toddlers. The International Journal of Bilingualism, 2, 347–372.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, S. C., Lewedeg, V. & Oller, D. K. (1997). The relation of input factors to lexical learning by bilingual infants. Applied Psycholinguistics, 18, 41–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, S. C. & Oller, D. K. (1993). Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms. Language Learning, 43, 93–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenblum, T. & Pinker, S. A. (1983). Word magic revisited: Monolingual and bilingual children's understanding of the word–object relationship. Child Development, 53, 773–780.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sankoff, G. (2001). Linguistic outcomes of language contact. In Trudgill, P., Chambers, J. & Schilling-Estes, N. (eds.), Handbook of sociolinguistics, pp. 638–668. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sénéchal, M., LeFevre, J., Thomas, E. M. & Daley, K. E. (1998). Differential effects of home literacy experiences on the development of oral and written language. Reading Research Quarterly, 33, 96–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uchikoshi, Y. (2006). English vocabulary development in bilingual kindergarteners: What are the best predictors? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9, 33–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Umbel, V. M. & Oller, D. K. (1994). Developmental changes in receptive vocabulary in Hispanic bilingual school children. Language Learning, 44, 221–242.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Umbel, V. M., Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, M. C. & Oller, D. K. (1992). Measuring bilingual children's receptive vocabularies. Child Development, 63, 1012–1020.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Widner, R. L., Smith, S. M. & Graziano, W. G. (1996). The effects of demand characteristics on the reporting of tip-of-the-tongue and feeling-of-knowing states. American Journal of Psychology, 109, 525–538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar