Lexical access and competition in bilingual children: The role of proficiency and the lexical similarity of the two languages.

Publisher: Academic Press Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 2985128R Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1096-0457 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 00220965 NLM ISO Abbreviation: J Exp Child Psychol Subsets: MEDLINE

Publication: New York, NY : Academic Press
Original Publication: New York.

Child Language* ; Comprehension* ; Multilingualism* ; Semantics*; Child ; Female ; Humans ; Male ; Reaction Time

Using a picture-auditory word recognition task, we examined how early child bilinguals access their languages and how the languages affect one another. Accuracy and response times in "false friends" (i.e., words with similar form but unrelated meanings) and semantically related words were compared with control conditions within and across languages and grades. Study 1 tested the performance of school-age children with balanced versus unbalanced knowledge of first-language (L1) Italian and second-language (L2) German. Study 2 compared unbalanced bilingual children with L1 Italian and L2 French or German to investigate the effect of lexical similarity in the children's languages. Children were found to activate both languages on receiving an auditory stimulus; performance in each language was affected by proficiency in the other language, degree of between-language similarity, and length of experience with each language. The BLINCS (Bilingual Language Interactive Network for Comprehension of Speech) model was invoked as a plausible framework for conceptualizing the nature of bilingual phonolexical representation and its effect on word recognition.
(Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Keywords: Child bilingual; Cross-linguistic similarity; False friends; French; German; Italian

Date Created: 20181127 Date Completed: 20200529 Latest Revision: 20200529

20231215

10.1016/j.jecp.2018.10.002

30476693