Lexical development; basic word classes; cross-linguistic comparison; word comprehension; word production; Child; Child, Preschool; Female; Humans; Language Development; Male; Child Language; Comprehension; Internationality; Speech Production Measurement; Vocabulary; Language and Linguistics; Linguistics and Language; Speech and Hearing
Abstract :
[en] This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.
Disciplines :
Education & instruction
Author, co-author :
Haman, Ewa; a Faculty of Psychology , University of Warsaw , Warsaw , Poland
Łuniewska, Magdalena; a Faculty of Psychology , University of Warsaw , Warsaw , Poland
Hansen, Pernille ; b MultiLing , University of Oslo , Oslo, Norway
Simonsen, Hanne Gram; b MultiLing , University of Oslo , Oslo, Norway
Chiat, Shula; c City University London , London , UK
Bjekić, Jovana; d Institute for Medical Research , University of Belgrade , Serbia
Blažienė, Agnė; e Vytautas Magnus University , Kaunas , Lithuania
Chyl, Katarzyna; a Faculty of Psychology , University of Warsaw , Warsaw , Poland
Dabašinskienė, Ineta; e Vytautas Magnus University , Kaunas , Lithuania
ENGEL DE ABREU, Pascale ; University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences (FHSE) > Department of Humanities (DHUM) > Multilingualism
Gagarina, Natalia; g Research Area Language Development and Multilingualism (FB II), Leibniz-ZAS Berlin , Berlin , Germany
Gavarró, Anna; h Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona , Barcelona , Catalonia , Spain
Håkansson, Gisela; i Lund University , Lund , Sweden
Harel, Efrat; j Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and Arts , Tel-Aviv , Israel
Holm, Elisabeth; b MultiLing , University of Oslo , Oslo, Norway
Kapalková, Svetlana; k Comenius University in Bratislava , Bratislava , Slovakia
Kunnari, Sari; l Research Unit of Logopedics, University of Oulu , Oulu , Finland
Levorato, Chiara; m University of Padua , Padua , Italy
Lindgren, Josefin; n Uppsala University , Uppsala , Sweden
Mieszkowska, Karolina; a Faculty of Psychology , University of Warsaw , Warsaw , Poland
Montes Salarich, Laia; h Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona , Barcelona , Catalonia , Spain
Potgieter, Anneke; o Department of General Linguistics , Stellenbosch University , Stellenbosch , South Africa
Ribu, Ingeborg; b MultiLing , University of Oslo , Oslo, Norway
Ringblom, Natalia; p Stockholm University , Stockholm , Sweden
Rinker, Tanja; q Department of Linguistics , University of Konstanz , Konstanz , Germany
Roch, Maja; m University of Padua , Padua , Italy
Slančová, Daniela; r Faculty of Arts, Prešov University , Prešov , Slovakia
Southwood, Frenette; o Department of General Linguistics , Stellenbosch University , Stellenbosch , South Africa
Tedeschi, Roberta; a Faculty of Psychology , University of Warsaw , Warsaw , Poland
Tuncer, Aylin Müge; s Health Sciences Faculty, Health Sciences Faculty , Anadolu University , Eskişehir , Turkey
Ünal-Logacev, Özlem; t School of Health Science, Istanbul Medipol University , Istanbul , Turkey
Vuksanović, Jasmina; d Institute for Medical Research , University of Belgrade , Serbia
Armon-Lotem, Sharon; u Bar-Ilan University , Ramat-Gan , Israel
Agentúra na Podporu Výskumu a Vývoja Harry Crossley Foundation Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad Norges Forskningsråd Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) International Visegrad Fund Berliner Senate National Science Center (Poland) Ministry for Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia Birgit and Gad Rausing Foundation National Research Foundation of South Africa Åke Wiberg Stiftelse
