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Part of
Multilingual Acquisition and Learning: An ecosystemic view to diversity
Edited by Elena Babatsouli
[Studies in Bilingualism 67] 2024
► pp. 473–499

Chapter 18
Lexical development of French-Portuguese simultaneous bilinguals

Exploration of vocabulary size, word class distribution and lexical selectivity

| Laboratory Dynamique Du Langage (CNRS-Lyon2)
| iBrain UMR1253 (Université de Tours, INSERM)

This study compares the lexical development of a sample of 29 simultaneous French-Portuguese bilingual children between the ages of 24 and 36 months living in France with the lexical development of a sample of 288 monolingual French children. The data show that bilingual children do not show a lexical developmental delay compared to their monolingual French peers. Moreover, the word class distribution of productive vocabulary is the same between the French monolinguals and bilinguals in French. Finally, we tested the lexical selectivity by calculating the phonetic complexity of the target words. We found a strong correlation between the phonetic complexity of target words and vocabulary size in both languages for bilinguals. This strong correlation mirrors that found for monolingual peers.

Keywords: bilingualism, lexicon, word class, lexical selectivity, French, Portuguese
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Lexicon size of monolingual and bilingual children
    • 1.2Grammatical composition of early lexicon in monolingual and bilingual children
    • 1.3Lexical selectivity in monolingual and bilingual children
  • 2.This study
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Material and procedures
      • 3.2.1Vocabulary assessment
      • 3.2.2Children’s background and language exposure assessment
      • 3.2.3Phonetic complexity measurement
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Quantitative development of productive vocabulary
    • 4.2Word class distribution of productive vocabulary
    • 4.3Lexical selectivity
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 30 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.18ker
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