ABSTRACT

In bilingual children, more so than in monolingual children, comprehension abilities exceed production abilities. While this receptive-expressive gap in bilinguals has been well documented, little is known about its development. The present study tracked growth in the Spanish and English receptive and expressive vocabularies of 52 bilingual children from 4.5–10 years. The children’s English vocabularies grew faster than their Spanish vocabularies, more so in the expressive domain than the receptive domain. The proportion of children who were English-dominant also increased more in the expressive than the receptive domain. By age 10, the children’s expressive skills were almost always English dominant while their receptive skills were most frequently balanced. Among children who hear a heritage language at home and a societal language at school, trajectories of dual language development differs in the expressive and receptive domains. These longitudinal data suggest continuity between the receptive-expressive gap observed in bilingual children and the receptive bilingualism often observed in adults.

摘要

与单语儿童相比，双语儿童的理解能力超过生产能力。虽然双语者的这种接受-表达差距已被充分记录，但对其发展知之甚少。本研究追踪了 52 名 4.5-10 岁双语儿童的西班牙语和英语接受性和表达性词汇的增长。孩子们的英语词汇量比他们的西班牙语词汇量增长得更快，在表达领域比在接受领域更是如此。以英语为主导的儿童的比例在表达领域也比在接受领域有所增加。到 10 岁时，孩子们的表达能力几乎总是以英语为主，而他们的接受能力往往是平衡的。在家里听到传统语言而在学校听到社会语言的孩子中，双语发展的轨迹在表达域和接受域不同。这些纵向数据表明，在双语儿童中观察到的接受-表达差距与在成人中经常观察到的接受性双语之间存在连续性。