Woordkennis Van Turkse Kinderen in de Bovenbouw Van Het Basisonderwijs

Abstract

In this study the breadth and depth of lexical knowledge in bilingual Turkish students in the Netherlands is compared to this knowledge in monolingual peers in Turkey. The Dutch students also performed a Dutch test on deep lexical knowledge, i.e. the Word Association Task (WAT). The results show that the bilingual children lag behind their peers in Turkey in both breadth (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) and depth (WAT) of lexical knowledge. Differences in deep lexical knowledge are relatively small compared to the differences in breadth of lexical knowledge. Furthermore, it turns out that the bilingual children's performance on the Dutch WAT is better than on the Turkish WAT. These findings are discussed in the context of transfer of lexical knowledge and the need for adequate vocabulary instruction to (bilingual) children.