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Part of
Language Impairment in Multilingual Settings: LITMUS in action across Europe
Edited by Sharon Armon-Lotem and Kleanthes K. Grohmann
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 29] 2021
► pp. 77–98

A case study of a quadrilingual child

The influence of exposure and cognates when developing multiple languages

| Lund University | Linnaeus University
| Linnaeus University

This paper reports on a case study of a quadrilingual child, Stefan, born and raised in Sweden and exposed to four languages before his first birthday: English, French, Russian and Swedish. We examine his vocabularies in these languages by the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (Haman, Łuniewska, & Pomiechowska, 2015), designed to measure vocabulary in monolingual and multilingual children. Stefan’s scores on comprehension and production reveal proficiency in all his languages, to varying degrees, and with comprehension exceeding production. While highlighting direct and indirect exposure as explanation for the variation in proficiency, we also discuss cognate vocabulary as an important factor for multilingual language development. In the production tasks, Stefan demonstrates not only vocabulary knowledge but also language-specific use of morphosyntax.

Keywords: simultaneous multilingualism, quadrilingual, Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks, vocabulary, exposure, cognates, distributed vocabulary
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Development of vocabulary
    • 2.2Language exposure
    • 2.3Cognate vocabulary
    • 2.4Distributed vocabulary
  • 3.The present study
    • 3.1Research questions
    • 3.2Method
      • The participant: Demographic data
      • Data collection
      • Procedure
      • Scoring
      • Ethical considerations
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1General proficiency in the four languages
      • 4.1.1Comprehension and production
      • 4.1.2Nouns and verbs
      • 4.1.3Language-specific grammar
    • 4.2Influence of exposure
    • 4.3Cognates
    • 4.4Distribution of vocabulary
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.29.03hak
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