Journal
JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE CONTACT
Volume 13, Issue 3, Pages 482-500Publisher
BRILL
DOI: 10.1163/19552629-13030001
Keywords
bilingual language acquisition; language similarity; vocabulary development; lexicon size
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The study found that language similarity has a significant impact on the vocabulary size of bilingual children, with greater similarity leading to a larger vocabulary.
It is well established that L2 acquisition is faster when the L2 is more closely related to the learner's Li. In the current study we investigated whether language similarity has a comparable facilitative effect in early simultaneous bilingual children. The similarity between each bilingual child's two languages was determined using phonological and typological scales. We compared the vocabulary size of bilingual toddlers learning different pairs of languages. Results show that the vocabulary size of bilingual children is indeed influenced by similarity: the more similar the languages, the larger the children's vocabulary.
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