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Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 10:5 (2020) ► pp.587–622

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Vocabulary development in closely-related languages

Age, word type and cognate facilitation effects in bilingual Swedish-German preschool children

ORCiD logo with link | Uppsala University
 | Uppsala University
Published online: 25 January 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.18041.lin
Abstract
This paper investigates vocabulary comprehension and production in 46 bilingual Swedish-German children age 4–6 growing up in Sweden. Using a newly developed tool, the Cross-linguistic Lexical Task (CLT, Haman, E., Łuniewska, M. & Pomiechowska, B. (2015). Designing cross-linguistic lexical tasks (CLTs) for bilingual preschool children. In: S. Armon-Lotem, J. de Jong, & N. Meir (eds.), Methods for assessing multilingual children: disentangling bilingualism from Language Impairment (pp. 196–239). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), the children’s receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge of nouns and verbs is assessed in both their languages, compared to each other and over age. Performance on test items of different word types (nouns/verbs; cognates/non-cognates) is also explored. There are clear vocabulary gains with age for the majority language Swedish, but not for the minority (home) language German. Overall vocabulary scores are higher in Swedish than in German, but this difference only concerns verbs, not nouns. Cognate facilitation occurs both ways in these closely-related languages, but is stronger in the minority language German. We suggest that what at first sight looks like a noun advantage on the German CLT is largely an effect of Swedish/German cognate status.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Vocabulary, age and input
    • 2.2Differences between nouns and verbs
    • 2.3Cognates
  • 3.Research questions and predictions
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Materials
    • 4.3Procedure
    • 4.4Scoring of the CLT
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Differences between languages and subtasks
    • 5.2Age effects
    • 5.3Types of test items – cognates and non-cognates
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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