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Lexical-semantic skills in bilingual children who are becoming English-dominant: A longitudinal study*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2013

LI SHENG
LI SHENG*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas at Austin
*
Address for correspondence: Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Texas at Austin, 2504-A Whitis Ave., Austin, TX 78712, USA. [email protected]
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Abstract

Twenty-seven Mandarin–English bilingual children participated in picture identification and picture naming tasks at two time points, 16 months apart. The younger children (mean age = 4 years) showed greater gains over time than the older children (mean age = 6 years 10 months) in English lexical-semantic skills and neither group showed significant gains in Mandarin. At the individual level, a majority of the children showed increased accuracy for the English tasks, but only half of them did so for the Mandarin tasks. Analyses of error distribution indicated production of more advanced error types in the older children and in English, as well as different patterns of time-related changes in error types in the two languages. These findings illustrate how age and initial language proficiency are related to lexical growth among Mandarin-speaking bilingual children who are becoming English-dominant.

Keywords

picture namingpicture identificationMandarinEnglisherror analysislongitudinal method
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , July 2014 , pp. 556 - 571
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

The author would like to thank the children and their families for participating in the study, Ying Lu and Brooke Lauper for collecting the data, and Dr. Carmen Silva-Corvalán and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this paper. This research was supported by a Grant Preparation Award from the University of Texas at Austin.

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