Arabic-Swedish-Speaking Children Living in Sweden: Vocabulary Skills in Relation to Age, SES and Language Exposure

Ute Bohnacker,Rima Haddad,Linnéa Öberg

doi:10.16993/jhlr.37

Abstract

This paper investigates the receptive and expressive vocabulary skills of 100 Arabic-Swedish-speaking children ages 4;0–7;11 growing up in Sweden. We explore how vocabulary in this under-researched population is affected by age, socio-economic status (SES), age of onset, daily exposure and home language use in the family (parents, siblings, extended family and friends) and via mother tongue instruction. Comprehension and production of nouns and verbs were assessed with the Arabic and Swedish versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs; Haman et al., 2015). Background information was collected via a parental questionnaire. In our cross-sectional study, comprehension was better in the minority home language (Arabic) than in the majority language (Swedish) for the youngest (4-year-old children), but this difference levelled out at ages 5, 6 and 7. There was a clear and positive effect of age on receptive and expressive vocabulary scores in both languages. For neither language was there any effect of SES (parental education). Age of onset and daily exposure had a measurable effect on Swedish vocabulary scores, whilst for Arabic, daily exposure and input in the home played an important role: Children whose parents mostly spoke Arabic to them had significantly higher Arabic vocabulary scores than other children. The complex interplay of environmental and individual-level factors on vocabulary skills is also illustrated by four case studies. These results from a Swedish context complement vocabulary studies of other language combinations and reveal the importance of input for the development of vocabulary in bilingual children.

Highlights

Introduction(Home languages are defined as languages that are not the majority language of society and are spoken by the child’s family and/or close community.) Of the minority home languages spoken by Swedish preschool and school-age children, Arabic is by far the most prevalent: according to the National Authority for Education (2017), 25% of the children in förskoleklass (a preparatory year in between nursery school and primary school),) and 23% of the children in primary and lower secondary school (grades 1–9) are Arabic-speaking
Do lexical skills, but these gains are modulated by other factors such as the quantity and quality of input, which vary for children growing up with two languages
This paper has presented a first, cross-sectional snapshot of this process for 100 4-to-7-yearold Arabic-Swedish-speaking children growing up in Sweden

Summary

Introduction

(Home languages are defined as languages that are not the majority language of society and are spoken by the child’s family and/or close community.) Of the minority home languages spoken by Swedish preschool and school-age children, Arabic is by far the most prevalent: according to the National Authority for Education (2017), 25% of the children in förskoleklass (a preparatory year in between nursery school and primary school),) and 23% of the children in primary and lower secondary school (grades 1–9) are Arabic-speaking. Arabic-Swedish-speaking bilingual children include first-generation children born abroad (having mostly arrived – directly or indirectly – from Syria as refugees with their families, or from Iraq via family unification), as well as second-generation ‘heritagelanguage’ Arabic-speaking children born in Sweden (whose parents migrated mainly from Iraq and Lebanon, often having been refugees themselves or relatives of a refugee)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion