7. Using Parental Report to Assess Early Lexical Production in Children Exposed to More Than One Language

Abstract

Original citation Gatt, D., O'Toole, C. and Haman, E. (2015) 'Using parent report to assess early lexical production in children exposed to more than one

Investigating Vocabulary Abilities in Bilingual Portuguese-English-Speaking Children

“…Among those items that require exposure to be learned is vocabulary. The amount of exposure a child receives in each language will affect his/her vocabulary size (Hoff, Core, Place, Rumiche, Señor, & Parra, 2012) and the vocabulary knowledge will be distributed across languages (Gatt, O'Toole, & Haman, 2015;Gathercole & Thomas, 2009). Bilingual children might score a little below the norms in each of their languages when vocabulary size is analyzed for each language separately (Hoff et al, 2012;Gathercole & Thomas, 2009).…”

“…The Total Conceptual Vocabulary (TCV) scores are the number of concepts produced or understood by children in either language, whereby Translation Equivalents -corresponding words or expressions in the two languages -(TEs) are only counted once (O'Toole, 2013). Others have argued that, for comparisons of monolinguals and bilinguals, the use of both TCV and Total Vocabulary (TV) is needed (Gatt et al, 2015). The Total Vocabulary scores are the total number of words produced in both languages by children.…”

“…The use of parental reports for vocabulary assessment is seen as advantageous because they rely on the recognition of vocabulary items, rather than the recollection of them (Gatt et al, 2015;Fenson et al, 2007). They focus on current and emerging behaviors and avoid retrospective accounts of language.…”

“…According to Fenson et al (2007), norms for assessment of language can be used as preliminary screening tools for language impairment. Gatt, O'Toole, & Haman (2015) argue that measurements of vocabulary production can be one of the ways to identify early language delay.…”

“…As explained by Gatt, O'Toole, and Haman (2015), comparing the productive vocabulary of children that are exposed to more than one language can promote insights as to whether scores are specific to the language pair being studied or are common to other bilingual settings as well.…”