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“Corplum is a core from a plum”: The advantage of bilingual children in the analysis of word meaning from verbal context*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2011
Abstract
The possible advantage of bilingual children over monolinguals in analyzing word meanings from verbal context was examined. The subjects were 40 third-grade children (20 bilingual and 20 monolingual) recruited from independent schools in the USA. The two groups of participants were compared on their performance on a standardized test of receptive vocabulary and an experimental measure of word meanings, the Word–Context Test. Results revealed that on average, the bilingual children had smaller vocabularies in English. The bilinguals deduced the meaning from context of more words than the monolingual children, although there were no differences between groups on the rate of reaching the target meanings for words on which they were successful, and on the quality of their definitions. Moreover, bilingual children approached the task differently and they showed greater flexibility when analyzing word meanings from verbal context, thus indicating that bilinguals may be more efficient vocabulary learners than monolinguals.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011
Footnotes
The author's special thanks go to the children who participated in this study. I am grateful to the parents and teachers who made it possible to work with the children. I would also like to acknowledge Catherine E. Snow, Barbara Alexander Pan, Judith Frommer and Yuuko Uchikoshi, who commented on earlier versions of this paper, and the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback. I also thank Meredith Rowe for helping with the reliability assessment and Cheryl Dressler in assisting when identifying schools for this project.
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