The central research question is how intensive exposure to the majority language at school affects the development of vocabulary.
In a cross-sectional study with a longitudinal subsample follow-up, we investigated the development of vocabulary during the first
four years at school, as vocabulary development is considered an important factor regarding bilingual children’s success at
school. The sample consisted of 126 bilingual Russian/German-speaking children aged 6;0 to 10;11 years in Germany, who were tested
for expressive and receptive vocabulary using a picture naming task.
Our results show that while the majority language is acquired at an expected rate, the heritage language’s extensive vocabulary
does not develop further over the course of primary school attendance. The overlap of the vocabularies increases. Additionally,
the number of items that are named exclusively in the majority language increases, whereas the number of items that are named
exclusively in the heritage language decreases.
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2024. On the Role of Informal vs. Formal Context of Language Experience in Italian–German Primary School Children. Languages 9:2 ► pp. 63 ff.
Arntzen, Ragnar & Bjørn H. Kvifte
2023. Ordforråd og ordforrådsutvikling hos norskfødte tospråklige barn. Nordand 18:1 ► pp. 17 ff.
Fridman, Clara & Natalia Meir
2023. Lexical production and innovation in child and adult Russian Heritage speakers dominant in English and Hebrew. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 26:5 ► pp. 880 ff.
2022. Word form processing at school age: Evidence for similarities between bilingual and monolingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 25:2 ► pp. 283 ff.
2022. Structural and phonological cues for gender assignment in monolingual and bilingual children acquiring German. Experiments with real and nonce words. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7:1
Kupisch, Tanja
2021. Heritage Languages in Europe. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 45 ff.
Reez, Carina & Christine Czinglar
2021. Input und rezeptiver Wortschatz im Deutschen als Zweitsprache bei geflüchteten Jugendlichen in parallel geführten Intensivklassen an einer beruflichen Schule. Informationen Deutsch als Fremdsprache 48:6 ► pp. 598 ff.
2021. Heritage Languages around the World. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 11 ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. What a Bilingual's Languages Are Used For. In The Mysteries of Bilingualism, ► pp. 102 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.