Abstract
This study compares the lexical development of a sample of 29 simultaneous French-Portuguese bilingual children between the ages of 24 and 36 months living in France with the lexical development of a sample of 288 monolingual French children. The data show that bilingual children do not show a lexical developmental delay compared to their monolingual French peers. Moreover, the word class distribution of productive vocabulary is the same between the French monolinguals and bilinguals in French. Finally, we tested the lexical selectivity by calculating the phonetic complexity of the target words. We found a strong correlation between the phonetic complexity of target words and vocabulary size in both languages for bilinguals. This strong correlation mirrors that found for monolingual peers.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company