Depth and breadth of vocabulary in two languages: Which vocabulary skills transfer?

In this study, the authors examined the relationship between paradigmatic and syntagmatic word knowledge. The authors used familiar concrete nouns administered in Spanish and English to 88 bilingual 4th and 5th graders. Students were tested on the ability to provide superordinates, communicatively adequate definitions, and rich object descriptions. Producing superordinates in Spanish was a reliable predictor of the same skill in English, while controlling for breadth of vocabulary knowledge in each language. The relationship between communicative skills in Spanish and English was evident only when English and Spanish breadth of vocabulary knowledge were controlled. Communicative adequacy of definitions and rich descriptions of concrete nouns depended more on specific vocabulary knowledge in English than on transfer.

[1]  J. Algina,et al.  Cognitive Assessment of Language and Math Outcomes , 1990 .

[2]  David Bloome,et al.  Classrooms and Literacy , 1989 .

[3]  S. Engel.  Thought and Language , 1964 .

[4]  William E. Nagy,et al.  Spanish-English Bilingual Students' Use of Cognates in English Reading , 1993 .

[5]  Rob Schoonen,et al.  Lexical Knowledge of Monolingual and Bilingual Children. , 1993 .

[6]  E. Bialystok.  Language Processing in Bilingual Children , 1991 .

[7]  R. Levine,et al.  Influences of Women's Schooling on Maternal Behavior in the Third World , 1980, Comparative Education Review.

[8]  James M. Royer.  The sentence verification technique: A new direction in the assessment of reading comprehension. , 1990 .

[9]  Catherine E. Snow.  The Problem with Bilingual Education Research Critiques: A Response to Rossell. , 1987 .

[10]  Catherine E. Snow,et al.  The relation between first-and second-language writing skills: Evidence from Puerto Rican elementary school children in bilingual programs , 1989 .

[11]  Catherine E. Snow,et al.  Children's language , 1990 .

[12]  W. Lambert.  The Social Psychology of Language: A Perspective for the 1980's , 1980 .

[13]  J. Cummins,et al.  Linguistic Interdependence and the Educational Development of Bilingual Children , 1979 .

[14]  J. Kroll,et al.  Tutorials in bilingualism : psycholinguistic perspectives , 1999 .

[15]  Barbara Hancin-Bhatt,et al.  Lexical transfer and second language morphological development , 1994, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[16]  J. Kroll,et al.  Lexical and conceptual memory in the bilingual: mapping form to meaning in two languages , 2020, The Bilingualism Reader.

[17]  J. M. Anglin.  Vocabulary Development: A Morphological Analysis , 1994 .

[18]  Brent Wolter.  COMPARING THE L1 AND L2 MENTAL LEXICON , 2001, Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

[19]  C. Snow,et al.  The development of definitional skill , 1990, Journal of Child Language.

[20]  M. Wesche,et al.  Assessing Second Language Vocabulary Knowledge: Depth Versus Breadth. , 1996 .

[21]  Thomas H. Huckin.  Second language reading and vocabulary learning , 1995 .

[22]  M. Verhallen,et al.  Lexical knowledge in L1 and L2 of third and fifth graders , 1998 .

[23]  D. Wagner,et al.  Does learning to read in a second language always put the child at a disadvantage? Some counterevidence from Morocco , 1989, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[24]  Charlene Rivera.  Communicative competence approaches to language proficiency assessment : research and application , 1986 .

[25]  Jeanne M. De Temple,et al.  Language processing in bilingual children: Giving formal definitions: a linguistic or metalinguistic skill? , 1991 .