Receptive and expressive lexical skills in English-dominant bilingual pre-schoolers

Abstract

Lexical development refers to the process, within language acquisition, by which words are learnt, and previous research found that this is determined by the amount of exposure, especially in bilingual children. Research studies which document the lexical skills of Maltese children whose first language is English, is scarce. As such the current research study aimed to investigate the receptive and expressive lexical skills of English-dominant bilingual preschoolers. The participants were grouped into two; 3-year-olds (3;00 – 3;05 years), and 4-yearolds (4;00 – 4;05 years). In total, 43 participants were recruited, mostly from independent schools and through snowball sampling. Each participant was assessed using Maltese and English versions of a receptive lexical task; the receptive-picture-name-judgement task, and an expressive lexical task; the picture-naming task. With both languages, i.e. Maltese and English, having an official status in Malta, the gathered data comes from a stable bilingual community. Furthermore, the gathered data was analysed using three statistical tests which allowed the researcher to gain a better understanding of the participants’ lexical abilities. Also, the researcher was able to document the findings of each group’s performance, whilst comparing between the two age groups. After having analysed the results it was concluded that overall the older participants obtained higher mean scores than the three-year-olds, and it was also concluded that the mean scores achieved on the English tasks were higher than those achieved on the Maltese tasks. The discrepancy between the two age groups did not vary significantly, however the discrepancy between the two language versions was higher.