Abstract
AbstractBalanced bilingualism has inspired debates on bilingualism for a long time, but several questions related to this discourse remain unanswered. How common are balanced bilinguals? Does balance have a positive impact on language proficiency? More specifically, when children begin to frequent schools and thus have a lot of oral and literal input in the school language, how do balance and dominance develop? The present paper discusses the following research questions with respect to vocabulary: Do balanced test results in two languages correlate with a better proficiency than unbalanced results? Moreover, is a balanced use of two languages accompanied by a balanced vocabulary? We used a picture naming task to test the expressive and receptive vocabulary of 98 German-Turkish speaking schoolchildren in a cross-sectional design. To determine balance resp. dominance, we used a combined score of the values in the German and the Turkish testing. The balance/dominance scores show a continuous shift to dominance in the majority language. Consistent use of Turkish has an effect on Turkish vocabulary, but not a negative impact on vocabulary in German. There was no overall positive influence of balanced bilingualism.
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