Developing a written lexicon in a multilingual environment

Abstract

Children educated in Catalonia are growing in a multilingual environment. Catalan is their school language but not necessarily their home or social language. Our goal was to track the presence of such multilingual input in the written lexicon of 2,436 students throughout compulsory schooling. Participants were asked to write down as many names as they remembered of five semantic fields and to produce 6 types of text. The two corpora were tapped for the presence of non-Catalan and hybrid constructions. Unexpectedly, these accounted for only 3% of the total number of lexical forms in the corpora. The imperviousness of the corpora to multilingual influence is discussed in terms of the constraints placed by the written modality and by the school-situated conditions of task production.