Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from cross-linguistic lexical tasks (LITMUS-CLT)
Haman, E., Łuniewska, M., Hansen, P. , Simonsen, H. G., Chiat, S., Bjekić, J., Blaziene, A., Chyl, K., Dabasinskiene, I., Engel de Abreu, P., Gagarina, N., Gavarro, A., Hakansson, G., Harel, E., Holm, E., Kapalkova, S., Kunnari, S., Levorato, C., Lindgren, J., Mieszkowska, K., Montes Salarich, L., Potgieter, A., Ribu, I., Ringblom, N., Rinker, T., Roch, M., Slancova, D., Southwood, F., Tedeschi, R., Tuncer, A. M., Unal-Logacev, O., Vuksanović, J. & Armon-Lotem, S. (2017). Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from cross-linguistic lexical tasks (LITMUS-CLT). Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 31(11-12), pp. 818-843. doi: 10.1080/02699206.2017.1308553
Abstract
This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.
| Publication Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics on 25 April 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/02699206.2017.1308553 |
| Publisher Keywords: | Lexical development, cross-linguistic comparison, basic word classes, word comprehension, word production |
| Subjects: | P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
| Departments: | School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Language & Communication Science |
| SWORD Depositor: |
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