ABSTRACT

Studies on multilingual word learning have focused on identifying a bilingual advantage over monolingual peers, paying little attention to the relationships between bilinguals’ existing vocabulary size and novel word learning. This study compared monolingual and bilingual school-age children on word learning tasks in familiar and unfamiliar languages and examined the relationships between bilingual vocabulary and multilingual word learning. The results showed no significant differences between monolingual and bilingual children in any of the word learning tasks. In addition, the results suggested that bilingual children use vocabulary in the languages they know in a specific way; whereas vocabulary in the dominant language seems to have a facilitative role for word learning in any language (language-dominant pattern), vocabulary in the non-dominant language is used only when learning new words in that particular language (language-dependent pattern).

摘要

多语单词学习的研究集中在确定双语相对于单语同龄人的优势，很少关注双语者现有词汇量与新词学习之间的关系。本研究比较了单语和双语学龄儿童在熟悉和不熟悉的语言中的单词学习任务，并检查了双语词汇和多语单词学习之间的关系。结果表明，在任何单词学习任务中，单语和双语儿童之间没有显着差异。此外，结果表明，双语儿童以特定方式使用他们所知道的语言中的词汇；而主导语言中的词汇似乎对任何语言的单词学习都有促进作用（语言主导模式），