Lexical access in the second year: a study of monolingual and bilingual vocabulary development

Abstract

It is well established that vocabulary size is related to efficiency in auditory processing, such that children with larger vocabularies recognize words faster than children with smaller vocabularies. The present study evaluates whether this relation is specific to the language being assessed, or related to general language or cognitive processes. Speed of word processing was measured longitudinally in Spanish- and English-learning monolinguals and bilinguals at 16 and 22 months of age. Speed of processing in bilinguals was similar to monolinguals, suggesting that the number of languages to which children are exposed does not influence word recognition. Further, cross-language associations in bilinguals suggest that the dominant language supports processing in the non-dominant language. These cross-language associations are consistent with general language and cognitive efficiency accounts in which the relation between word processing and knowledge relies on experience within a language as well as on general and cognitive properties of language learning.

Assessing a continuum of lexical–semantic knowledge in the second year of life: A multimodal approach

“…Estimates of daily language exposure were derived from parent reports of the number of hours of language input by parents, relatives, and other caregivers in contact with the infants. Only those infants with at least 80% language exposure to English were included in the study (DeAnda, Bosch, Poulin-Dubois, Zesiger, & Friend, 2016; DeAnda, Hendrickson, Zesiger, Poulin-Dubois, & Friend, 2016). …”

Explaining Individual Differences in Trajectories of Simultaneous Bilingual Development: Contributions of Child and Environmental Factors

“…Indeed, individual differences in the onset of joint attention (Brooks & Meltzoff, 2008) and in the ability to learn patterns (aka statistical learning; Kidd & Arciuli, 2016) have been found to predict language development. Other cognitive abilities with relations to language growth include speed of lexical retrieval (DeAnda, Hendrickson, Zesiger, Poulin-Dubois, & Friend, 2018;Weisleder & Fernald, 2013) and nonverbal intelligence (Collins, O'Connor, Su arez-Orozco, Nieto-Castañon, & Toppelberg, 2014;Farnia & Geva, 2011).…”

The impact of cross-language phonological overlap on bilingual and monolingual toddlers’ word recognition

“…However, considering the variety of accented English the children heard, we believe our choice of stimuli was valid (i.e., one of the varieties the children heard). Non-native or non-parental input of an L2 may lead to a weaker lexical-semantic connections and therefore slower word recognition speed (DeAnda et al, 2017). In the current study, therefore, the presence of non-native English in the input of the bilingual toddlers may have resulted in diminished word recognition.…”