Bilingual children’s use of lexical strategies under narrative monologue and dialogue conditions

Abstract

Purpose This study examined lexical strategies produced by Spanish-English bilingual kindergartners across two different narrative elicitation tasks. Method Fifty participants (M = 67.24 months) produced narratives in English under monologue and dialogue conditions. Participants were placed in high and low language performance groups determined by results from a bilingual language screener. Per parent report, children were matched by age, current language use, and age of first exposure to English. Analyses examined strategy types across participants’ performance levels and task condition. Further evaluation compared strategy usage with general language productivity measures. Results Child learners access similar lexical strategies as reported for adult second language learners. Performance level did not differentiate strategy type and frequency of use. Overall, participants relied more on all-purpose words and code-switching in the monologue condition, while employment of word approximation and literal translation increased during the mediated dialogue sessions. Application of all-purpose words, word approximations, and literal translation influenced utterance length and lexical diversity. Conclusions Participants adjusted lexical strategy use according to narrative condition. The application of mediated learning serves as an instructional model that reveals information specific to young second language learners. Application of all-purpose words, word approximations, and literal translation influenced utterance length and lexical diversity. Implications Insight to the characteristics of bilingual children’s language processing skills guides evidenced-based instructional decisions.

Lexical-semantic skills in bilingual children who are becoming English-dominant: A longitudinal study

“…Semantic errors occur when children have knowledge of the target's semantic category, thematic context of use, or functional and physical features (German & Newman, 2004; McGregor, 1997; Sheng & McGregor, 2010; Yan & Nicoladis, 2009). Semantic substitutions and circumlocutions are effective communicative strategies individuals use to compensate for lexical gaps or temporary retrieval difficulties (Dörnyei & Kormos, 1998; Dörnyei & Scott, 1997; Greene et al, 2012). The frequent production of semantic substitutions in the older children reflects more advanced cognitive and linguistic skills in these children.…”

“…While “don't know” errors were uninformative as for the locus of word retrieval difficulties, the decrease of language-switches and the concurrent increase of “don't know” responses suggest changes at the pragmatic and/or cognitive level. Language-switches are yet another communicative strategy children use to demonstrate their linguistic knowledge (Greene et al, 2012). Frequent and successful language-switching from L1 to English has been observed in previous studies of Spanish-speaking children (Sheng et al, 2013; Sheng, Peña, Bedore & Fiestas, 2012).…”

“…They found that when unable to name pictures in the specified language, children frequently produced a more general word, a word from the same semantic domain, coined names, or the correct name from the other language. In studies of second language learners (Dörnyei & Kormos, 1998; Dörnyei & Scott, 1997; Greene, Bedore & Peña, 2012), researchers found that use of general-all-purpose words (e.g., thing , stuff , or bird in place of duck ), semantic substitutions, circumlocutions (e.g., ring : “round like a circle, but you put it here [point to finger]”), word coinage (e.g., branching in place of climbing , ocean ladder in place of bridge ), and code-switches in discourse contexts are common communicative strategies adopted by learners to solve lexical retrieval problems and to compensate for limited vocabulary. Finally, in a study of Spanish–English bilingual children's semantic depth, Sheng, Bedore, Peña and Fiestas (2013) found that children were much more likely to switch from Spanish to English than vice versa when producing word associations and a majority of the language-switched responses resulted in semantically related associations.…”

Cognitive and Linguistic Predictors of Language Control in Bilingual Children

“…However, studies have yielded conflicting results as to whether bilingual children at risk for DLD differ from their typically developing peers in their language switching patterns and frequency of their switches into the non-target language. Some studies (e.g., Gutierrez-Clellen et al, 2009;Greene et al, 2014) have identified no quantitative or qualitative differences in switches out of the target language by Spanish/English bilingual children with low/impaired language compared to typically developing peers during narrative and conversation tasks. Greene et al (2013) found qualitative but not quantitative differences in language switching during a semantic task.…”

“…Past work in children with typical language development has focused on language-specific skills as constraining children's ability to adjust their language choice to accommodate the current conversation partner or language context (e.g., Lanza, 1992;Genesee et al, 1995Genesee et al, , 1996Gawlitzek-Maiwald and Tracy, 1996;Nicoladis and Secco, 2000;Lanvers, 2001;Cantone and Mueller, 2005;Ribot and Hoff, 2014). Contributions of overall language ability to language control have been examined mostly in children with language impairment (e.g., Gutierrez-Clellen et al, 2009;Iluz-Cohen and Walters, 2012;Greene et al, 2013Greene et al, , 2014Mammolito, 2015). The current study demonstrated a relationship between overall language ability and language control in bilingual children across a broad spectrum of ability ranging from impaired to above-average.…”