Do bilingual children know fewer words than monolinguals?

8 Feb 2013

My latest contribution to InCulture Parent. It a short report on a recent research article about bilingual children's vocabulary development (my favourite thesis topic).


Linguistic research in young bilingual children has focused on whether multilingual children develop language skills in the same way and at the same speed as monolingual children. Numerous studies in the field have focused on this question by examining different aspects of language, including grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc.
A recent article from Diane Poulin-Dubois, Helen Bialystok and their colleagues (2012), published in the International Journal of Bilingualism, looks at the area of vocabulary. Research has often shown that bilingual children produce their first word at about the same time as monolingual children, on average. But there is still more to be understood in this area. This study analyzes whether children exposed to two languages on a frequent basis access words in the brain and produce words in the same way as monolingual children. The children in their study were 24 months old at the time of testing.
Read more here.

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