Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children

By Ellen Bialystok, G. Luk, Kathleen F. Peets, Sujin Yang. Bilingualism, 2009

809 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Studies often report that bilingual participants possess a smaller vocabulary in the language of testing than monolinguals, especially in research with children. However, each study is based on a small sample so it is difficult to determine whether the vocabulary difference is due to sampling error. We report the results of an analysis of 1,738 children between 3 and 10 years old and demonstrate a consistent difference in receptive vocabulary between the two groups. Two preliminary analyses suggest that this difference does not change with different language pairs and is largely confined to words relevant to a home context rather than a school context.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5013ab235343d88925d94a81cefc704a8110a305

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Describing bilinguals: A systematic review of labels and descriptions used in the literature between 2005–2015 (2017, neutral): “While bilinguals often demonstrate lower verbal abilities than monolinguals (Bialystok, Luk, Peets, & Yang, 2010; Oller, Pearson, & Cobo-Lewis, 2007; Portocarrero et al., 2007), statistical dispersions of the samples can be considered as indications of sample homogeneity.”
Bilingualism: Consequences for Mind and Brain (2012, background): “Considering simply receptive vocabulary size, bilingual children [23] and adults [24] control a smaller vocabulary in the language of the community than do their monolingual counterparts.”
The Bilingual Adaptation: How Minds Accommodate Experience (2017, background): “Bialystok et al. (2010a) included monolingual English-speaking children from Canada, monolingual French-speaking children from France, and bilingual children in Canada who spoke English plus a variety of other languages.”
What Defines Language Dominance in Bilinguals? (2019, result): “This was the case, for example, in the study that Bialystok et al. (2010) carried out among 1,738 children (996 bilinguals and 772 monolinguals) between the ages of 3 and 10 for whom English was either the first or the second language.”