Individual differences in very young Chinese children’s English vocabulary breadth and semantic depth: internal and external factors

Abstract

This study examines the English vocabulary development of 43 very young child English as a foreign language (FL) learners (age 3.2-6.2) in China. They were tested twice for vocabulary breadth (reception and production) and semantic depth (paradigmatic and syntagmatic vocabulary knowledge). The development of the English vocabulary knowledge between these two measurements was predicted using a series of internal factors and external factors. An exploratory mixedeffects regression analysis revealed that English use, interacting with age of English onset, significantly predicted such growth. Older children benefitted more from practicing English to enhance their English vocabulary. The amount of English input at school was found to positively impact the development of English syntagmatic knowledge. Chinese paradigmatic knowledge significantly influenced the growth of English paradigmatic and syntagmatic knowledge. These findings indicate that at least at an early stage, external factors play an important role in child FL vocabulary development, particularly in children with a later age of English onset. Furthermore, the transfer of concepts from the first language to the second language (L2) might be more pronounced with respect to L2 semantic depth than L2 vocabulary breadth. This conceptual transfer is relevant to FL learners as young as three years of age.

Differential effects of internal and external factors in early bilingual vocabulary learning: The case of Singapore

“…Backward regression has been used to address possible multicollinearity effects (Field, 2013), as some of the predictors were moderately correlated as demonstrated in Table 2. It is vital to make sure that large portions of explained variance of the dependent variable are not shared between predictors, in order to allow interpretability of effects and reliability of estimated coefficients (Sun, Steinkrauss, Tendeiro, et al, 2016; Sun, Steinkrauss, Wieling, et al, 2016). Variance inflation factor and tolerance indicators were examined for the six models, and all variance inflation factor values were below 10 and tolerance figures above 0.2, allowing us to safely conclude that there is no issue with multicollinearity in our final models (Field, 2013).…”

“…Both internal and external factors are considered essential to child early language development (Clark, 2003; Sun, Steinkrauss, Wieling, & de Bot, 2016). As noted above, internal factors are intrinsic to the learner, including biological characteristics (age and gender) and cognitive abilities (e.g., working memory and intelligence).…”

“…As mentioned above, there are not many studies on the relationship between internal and external factors in child vocabulary acquisition, and those conducted by Paradis (2011) and Sun et al (Sun, Steinkrauss, Tendeiro, et al, 2016; Sun, Steinkrauss, Wieling, et al, 2016) are among the few. Paradis's research (2011) on immigrant children in Canada found that internal factors together (e.g., short-term memory and analytical ability) were better predictors of linguistic outcome than external factors.…”

“…Hypothesis 1: Based on findings in input-rich (e.g., Paradis, 2011) and input-poor settings (e.g., Sun, Steinkrauss, Tendeiro, et al, 2016; Sun, Steinkrauss, Wieling, et al, 2016), components of both internal factors (i.e., age, language aptitude, and gender) and external factors (i.e., input quantity, input quality, output, and SES) are expected to explain some variance of English and MT vocabulary knowledge.…”

Different Starting Points for English Language Learning: A Comparative Study of Danish and Spanish Young Learners

“…E-mail: munoz@ub.edu contexts. These differences may be due to many factors, both internal and external to the language learner (e.g., Sun, Steinkrauss, Tendeiro, & de Bot, 2016;Unsworth, Hulk, & Marinis, 2011). An important factor that has not received sufficient attention in L2 research is the linguistic distance between the learners' first language (L1) and their L2, despite the common acknowledgment that the number of hours of instruction required will differ depending on the relatedness of the languages.…”