ABSTRACT

Although children may productively use concrete nouns after limited exposure, complete mastery of adult-like patterns of noun usage can take up to 14 years. We evaluated whether a transition from universal to language-specific naming is part of the refinement in later lexical development, and we compared how this refinement plays out in monolingual versus bilingual children. We collected free naming data for pictures of nearly 200 household containers from 499 Belgian children, aged 5 to 14, and adults, raised with either (a) only French, (b) only Dutch, or (c) both French and Dutch. Both monolingual and bilingual 5-year olds produced largely shared naming patterns, and for both groups, naming patterns became more language-specific and also more consistent within-language over time. However, monolinguals and bilinguals diverged in some aspects of their developmental profiles. Monolinguals started to introduce language-specificities to their naming pattern beginning at age 8, but differentiation between languages did not emerge for bilinguals until age 12. Consensus on name choice increased across ages for both groups, but bilinguals showed more consensus at all ages, reflecting smaller vocabularies and less differentiation. Thus monolingual and bilingual children follow a similar trajectory from shared to language-specific patterns of word use, but bilinguals differentiate later and for only some words. This study demonstrates that a transition from shared to language-specific naming is a key aspect of later lexical development, but the developmental course differs in detail between monolingual and bilingual children.

摘要

尽管儿童在有限的接触后可能会生产性地使用具体名词，但完全掌握成人用法后，名词用法可能长达14年。我们评估了从通用命名到特定于语言的命名转换是否属于后来的词汇发展中的改进，并且我们比较了这种改进在单语和双语儿童中的表现。我们收集了免费的命名数据，其中包含来自（a）仅法语，（b）仅荷兰语或（c）法语和荷兰语的499名5至14岁比利时儿童和近200个家用集装箱的图片。5岁的单语者和双语者都产生了广泛共享的命名方式，并且随着时间的推移，这两组人的命名方式都变得更加特定于语言，并且在语言中也变得更加一致。然而，单语者和双语者在发展概况的某些方面存在分歧。从8岁开始，单语种就开始在其命名模式中引入语言特异性，但是直到12岁，双语者才开始出现语言之间的差异，两组人的名字选择共识在各个年龄段都有所提高，但是双语者在各个年龄段都表现出更多的共识，这反映出词汇量少，差异小。因此，单语和双语的孩子遵循相似的轨迹，从共享到特定于语言的单词使用方式，但是双语者后来又有所区别，仅针对某些单词。这项研究表明，从共享命名过渡到特定于语言的命名是后来词汇发展的关键方面，但单语和双语儿童的发展过程在细节上有所不同。