title: The role of within-language vocabulary size in children's semantic development: evidence from bilingual children.
abstract: This study tested whether bilingual children show a lag in semantic development (the schematic-categorical shift) relative to monolingual children due to smaller vocabularies within a language. Twenty French-English bilingual and twenty English monolingual children (seven to ten years old) participated in a picture-naming task in English. Their errors were coded for schematic or categorical relations. The bilingual children made more schematic errors than monolinguals, a difference that was accounted for statistically by vocabulary score differences. This result suggests that within-language vocabulary size is one important factor in semantic development and may explain why bilingual children sometimes show a lag relative to monolingual children in one of their languages, perhaps the language in which they have received less formal instruction.
authors: University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
authors: Margaux
authors: M
authors: Keith
authors: Elena
authors: E
authors: Nicoladis
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007804:Language Development; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary