Do They Know As Many Words?
Lexical knowledge in bilingual children
Although the advantages of being bilingual are numerous (see here), parents and educators are often worried that bilingual children will not know as many words as their monolingual peers. However much time one spends describing and justifying bilingualism (after all, half the world's population, if not more, is bilingual), the question keeps coming back is: But do bilingual children know as many words?
Dr. Barbara Zurer Pearson, a pioneering researcher in the field of childhood language acquisition, and her colleague Sylvia Fernández, studied this question in the 1990s. They examined the vocabulary development of English-Spanish bilingual children, aged between 8 and 30 months. They found that the rate and pace of development of the bilinguals' lexical knowledge were similar to those of monolingual children. In addition, the total vocabulary count of these children (taking into account both languages) was not different to that of the monolinguals, but their single language vocabularies were somewhat smaller. So we have known for some time that bilingual children do have as many words as their monolingual counterparts when both languages are taken into account but maybe not so when one examines only one language.
To see the rest of the article, please visit http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201306/do-they-know-many-words
Dr. Barbara Zurer Pearson, a pioneering researcher in the field of childhood language acquisition, and her colleague Sylvia Fernández, studied this question in the 1990s. They examined the vocabulary development of English-Spanish bilingual children, aged between 8 and 30 months. They found that the rate and pace of development of the bilinguals' lexical knowledge were similar to those of monolingual children. In addition, the total vocabulary count of these children (taking into account both languages) was not different to that of the monolinguals, but their single language vocabularies were somewhat smaller. So we have known for some time that bilingual children do have as many words as their monolingual counterparts when both languages are taken into account but maybe not so when one examines only one language.
To see the rest of the article, please visit http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201306/do-they-know-many-words
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