The role of within-language vocabulary size in children's semantic development: evidence from bilingual children

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study tested whether bilingual children show a lag in semantic development (the schematic–categorical shift) relative to monolingual children due to smaller vocabularies within a language. Twenty French–English bilingual and twenty English monolingual children (seven to ten years old) participated in a picture-naming task in English. Their errors were coded for schematic or categorical relations. The bilingual children made more schematic errors than monolinguals, a difference that was accounted for statistically by vocabulary score differences. This result suggests that within-language vocabulary size is one important factor in semantic development and may explain why bilingual children sometimes show a lag relative to monolingual children in one of their languages, perhaps the language in which they have received less formal instruction.