What does lexical retrieval performance in children and young adults say about developmental bilingualism?

Abstract

This project compared performance in 1) inhibitory control and lexical retrieval tasks between monolingual and bilingual participants in two age groups: 7-12 year-old children and young adults; and 2) inhibitory control skills among three groups of young adults with differing degrees of bilingualism: monolinguals, bilinguals, and second language (L2) learners; and 3) lexical competence in bilinguals and L2 learners. By conducting these comparisons, this project aimed to explain how bilingual performance relates to current language exposure, language proficiency, receptive-expressive gap of vocabulary, and occurrence of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. According to these results, first, bilingual children showed similar performance to their monolingual peers in lexical retrieval. This is possibly because they had similar patterns of language exposure and use to the monolinguals. In contrast, bilingual young adults performed similarly to monolinguals in terms of their expressive vocabulary size and receptive-expressive gap, but had larger receptive vocabulary and higher tip-of-tongue rates. Second, monolingual and bilingual young adults performed generally better than the L2 learners in both lexical retrieval and inhibitory control tasks. However, L2 learners scored similarly to bilingual young adults in tip-of-tongue rates and receptive-expressive gap. Finally, bilingual children performed better on the inhibitory control task than monolingual children, but this bilingual advantage in inhibitory control was not observed in the young adult groups. The findings will be discussed in relation to the Weaker Links account of bilingual lexical processing and their implications for the relation of lexical retrieval and inhibitory control at different stages of development and differing degrees of bilingualism.

Date of Award	2017
Original language	English