Work

Productive vocabulary among three groups of bilingual American children: Comparison and prediction

Year: 2014

Type: article

Abstract: The importance of input factors for bilingual children's vocabulary development was investigated. Forty-seven Argentine, 42 South Korean, 51 European American, 29 Latino immigrant, 26 Japanese immigrant, and 35 Korean immigrant mothers completed checklists of their 20-month-old children's productive vocabularies. Bilingual children's vocabulary sizes in each language separately were consistently smaller than their monolingual peers but only Latino bilingual children had smaller total vocabularies than monolingual children. Bilingual children's vocabulary sizes were similar to each other. Maternal acculturation predicted the amount of input in each language, which then predicted children's vocabulary size in each language. Maternal acculturation also predicted children's English-language vocabulary size directly.

Source: First Language

DOI: 10.1177/0142723714560178

Authors: Linda R. Cote, Marc H. Bornstein

Institutions: National Institutes of Health, Marymount University

Language: English

Topic: Language Development and Disorders

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Institutes of Health, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development