Linguistic Minority Children's Knowledge of multiple Word Meanings; Polysemy and the Testing of lexical Skills
René Appel | Institute for General Linguistics University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
It is often observed that minority children's lexical proficiency in the majority language lags behind that of majority children. This observations is substantiated by scores on vocabulary tests. However, in these (traditional) tests words are generally treated as having one meaning, while most words are polysemous, i.e. they have multiple meanings. A new test was designed to measure the knowledge of multiple word meanings of minority and majority children. Results pointed to a rather high correlation between the scores on a traditional vocabulary test and the newly developed test for the minority children. Furthermore, the minority children scored lower on the new test than the majority children, which suggests that they not only have a lexical deficit in their second language with respect to the number of words known, but also with respect to the number of meanings attached to each word.
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Cartwright, Kelly B., Ana Taboada Barber & Casey J. Archer
2022.
What’s the Difference? Contributions of Lexical Ambiguity, Reading Comprehension, and Executive Functions to Math Word Problem Solving in Linguistically Diverse 3rd to 5th Graders.
Scientific Studies of Reading 26:6
► pp. 565 ff.
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