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ERIC Number: EJ1319056
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022-Jan
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: N/A
Multilingual Toddlers' Vocabulary Development in Two Languages: Comparing Bilinguals and Trilinguals
Côté, Stephanie L.; Gonzalez-Barrero, Ana Maria; Byers-Heinlein, Krista
Journal of Child Language, v49 n1 p114-130 Jan 2022
Many children grow up hearing multiple languages, learning words in each. How does the number of languages being learned affect multilinguals' vocabulary development? In a pre-registered study, we compared productive vocabularies of bilingual (n = 170) and trilingual (n = 20) toddlers aged 17-33 months growing up in a bilingual community where both French and English are spoken. We hypothesized that because trilinguals have reduced input in French and English due to time spent hearing their third language, they would have smaller French-English vocabulary sizes than bilinguals. Trilinguals produced on average 2/3 of the number of words in these languages that bilinguals did: however, this difference was not statistically robust due to large levels of variability. Follow-up analyses did, however, indicate a relationship between input quantity and vocabulary size. Our results indicate that similar factors contribute to vocabulary development across toddlers regardless of the number of languages being acquired.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A