Abstract
The present study focuses on the discrepancy between receptive and expressive language competence among bilingual children and tests possible explanatory factors of this gap. The sample consisted of 406 bilingual children with German as their second language (L2) and 46 different first languages. Receptive and expressive German language competence (L2) were measured with a standardized language development test at the age of 43 months. As expected, a significant gap in receptive and expressive German language competence (L2) emerged in all language groups. The size of the gap reached 1 SD and correlated with the amount of language contact and thus provides support for the language exposure hypothesis. However, we found no evidence for the language familiarity hypothesis. The present study contributes to the understanding of mechanisms in bilingual language development and, hence, is consequential for both basic research and language assessment practice.
Highlights
Growing up bilingual is related to a series of advantages as well as disadvantages
We firstly examine whether the extent of the gap in L2 is due to the language familiarity of the first and second language
The share of children with a receptive–expressive gap in favor of receptive language according to Gibson et al.’s (2014) definition amounted to 62.3%, whereas only four children (1%) showed a significant gap in the opposite direction
Summary
Growing up bilingual is related to a series of advantages as well as disadvantages. In some cognitive and linguistic development domains bilingual children have an advantage over their monolingual peers (see Barac et al, 2014 for an overview). Bilingual compared to monolingual children show higher test scores in tasks on cognitive flexibility (e.g., Chen et al, 2014), memory (e.g., Brito et al, 2014), attention (e.g., Bialystok, 2015), control of interference (e.g., Filippi et al, 2015), metalinguistic, and language pragmatic competence (e.g., Kang, 2012) and visual language discrimination (e.g., Sebastian-Galles et al, 2012); in other development domains, such as vocabulary in the first (L1) and the second language (L2), bilingual children lag behind their monolingual peers (e.g., Pearson et al, 1993; Farnia and Geva, 2011; Hoff, 2013). We investigate whether the amount of contact with speakers of the second language—i.e., language exposure—could be a cause of the difference
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