The bilingual lexicon: implications for studies of language choice

Abstract

Lexical gaps in vocabulary development have been acknowledged as a reason for language mixing in young bilingual children. In spite of this, most studies do not take into account whether young bilinguals have the lexical resources to make a choice between their two languages. Inferences are nevertheless still being made about whether or not young bilinguals differentiate between their two languages based on language choice. It is widely believed, however, that young bilinguals do not have the resources to make lexical choices at a pre-syntactic stage of development before age two. A bilingual case study of an infant acquiring Spanish and English from birth to age 1;10 is used to address this issue. Daily diary records and weekly video recordings in the two language contexts are used to construct the child's lexicon and to establish that translation equivalents that make possible language choice are available from the beginning of speech. The results are used to discuss the importance of translation equivalents in the bilingual lexicon for viable interpretations of language choice.

Lexical mixing in the early productive vocabularies of Maltese children: Implications for intervention

“…These, however, are not brought about by children's inability to differentiate between languages but rather by the limited opportunity to learn lexical alternatives provided by the language environment. Evidence of cross-linguistic synonyms appearing before the age of two years (Pearson, Fernandez, & Oller, 1993;Deuchar & Quay, 2000;Quay, 1995) refutes propositions of an early fused system made by Volterra and Taeschner (1978) as well as Clark (1987).…”

“…Had the participants in the study been exposed to situations and communicative partners requiring the differential use of Maltese and English, parental report would indicate that the 18-and 30-month-old children have some lexical resources to make the necessary language choices (Quay, 1995), alongside the borrowing of English lexemes. There is no evidence, however, of children differentiating the use of such equivalents in the data, particularly since the dominant language of interaction was Maltese and no communicative opportunities demanding the use of English lexemes were available.…”

“…Quay (1995) states that young simultaneous bilinguals have the resources to make language choices if translation equivalents are present in their lexical repertoire. The absence of equivalent pairs may lead to lexical gaps which in turn promote language mixing.…”

Introduction

“…Le modeste corpus de recherche portant à ce jour sur le développement langagier des bilingues simultanés consiste en plusieurs études de cas (p. ex., De Houwer, 1990;Lanza, 1997;Quay, 1995). De telles études peuvent être une source d'inspiration pour du travail expérimental (voir Chan & Nicoladis, 2010), mais leur champ d'application est limité, et on ne peut pas en tirer immédiatement des conclusions générales sur des populations plus étendues.…”

Introduction

“…The extant small literature on simultaneous bilinguals' language development contains many case studies (e.g., De Houwer, 1990;Lanza, 1997;Quay, 1995). Such studies can inspire experimental work (see Chan & Nicoladis, 2010), but are limited in scope and cannot be automatically generalized to larger populations.…”