Cover not available
Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 10:5 (2020) ► pp.587–622

Vocabulary development in closely-related languages

Age, word type and cognate facilitation effects in bilingual Swedish-German preschool children

ORCID logo | Uppsala University
| Uppsala University

This paper investigates vocabulary comprehension and production in 46 bilingual Swedish-German children age 4–6 growing up in Sweden. Using a newly developed tool, the Cross-linguistic Lexical Task (CLT, Haman, Łuniewska & Pomiechowska 2015), the children’s receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge of nouns and verbs is assessed in both their languages, compared to each other and over age. Performance on test items of different word types (nouns/verbs; cognates/non-cognates) is also explored. There are clear vocabulary gains with age for the majority language Swedish, but not for the minority (home) language German. Overall vocabulary scores are higher in Swedish than in German, but this difference only concerns verbs, not nouns. Cognate facilitation occurs both ways in these closely-related languages, but is stronger in the minority language German. We suggest that what at first sight looks like a noun advantage on the German CLT is largely an effect of Swedish/German cognate status.

Keywords: Crosslinguistic Lexical Task (CLT), cognate facilitation effect, noun advantage
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Vocabulary, age and input
    • 2.2Differences between nouns and verbs
    • 2.3Cognates
  • 3.Research questions and predictions
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Materials
    • 4.3Procedure
    • 4.4Scoring of the CLT
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Differences between languages and subtasks
    • 5.2Age effects
    • 5.3Types of test items – cognates and non-cognates
  • 6.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 25 January 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.18041.lin
References
Akinci, M.-A.
(2017) Cognate and non-cognate lexical access of Turkish-French bilingual and French and Turkish monolingual 5-year-olds. Presentation at ISB 11, 11–15 June 2017, Limerick: University of Limerick.
Akoğlu, G. & Yağmur, K.
(2016) First-language skills of bilingual Turkish immigrant children growing up in a Dutch submersion context. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 19(6), 706–721. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Armon-Lotem, S., de Jong, J. & Meir, N.
(eds (2015) Assessing multilingual children: Disentangling bilingualism from language impairment. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bialystok, E., Luk, G., Peets, K. F. & Yang, S.
(2010) Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13(4), 525–531. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bohnacker, U., Lindgren, J. & Öztekin, B.
(2016) Turkish- and German-speaking bilingual 4-to-6-year-olds living in Sweden: Effects of age, SES and home language input on vocabulary production. Journal of Home Language Research 11, 17–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brenders, P., van Hell, J. G. & Dijkstra, T.
(2011) Word recognition in child second language learners: Evidence from cognates and false friends. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 109(4), 383–396. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Buac, M., Gross, M. & Kaushanskaya, M.
(2014) The role of primary caregiver vocabulary knowledge in the development of bilingual children’s vocabulary skills. Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research 57(5), 1804–1816. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carroll, S. E.
(1992) On cognates. Second Language Research 8(2), 93–119.Google Scholar
Cobo-Lewis, A. B., Pearson, B. Z., Eilers, R. E. & Umbel, V. C.
(2002) Effects of bilingualism and bilingual education on oral and written English skills: A multi-factor study of standardized test outcomes (pp. 64–97); Effects of bilingualism and bilingual education on oral and written Spanish skills: A multi-factor study of standardized test outcomes (pp. 98–117). In: D. K. Oller & R. E. Eilers (eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Costa, A., Caramazza, A. & Sebastián-Gallés, N.
(2000) The cognate facilitation effect: Implications for models of lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 26(5), 1283–1296.Google Scholar
Costa, A., Santesteban, M. & Caño, A.
(2005) On the facilitatory effects of cognate words in bilingual speech production. Brain and Language 94(1), 94–103. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davidoff, J. & Masterson, J.
(1996) The development of picture naming: Differences between verbs and nouns. Journal of Neurolinguistics 9(2), 69–83. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
de Groot, A. M.
(1992) Determinants of word translation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 18(5), 1001–1018.Google Scholar
de Groot, A. M. B. & Nas, G. L. J.
(1991) Lexical representation of cognates and noncognates in compound bilinguals. Journal of Memory and Language 301, 90–123. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dijkstra, J., Kuiken, F., Jorna, R. J. & Klinkenberg, E. L.
(2016) The role of majority and minority language input in the early development of a bilingual vocabulary. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19(01), 191–205. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Friel, B. M. & Kennison, S. M.
(2001) Identifying German-English cognates, false cognates, and non-cognates: Methodologial issues and descriptive norms. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 4(3), 249–274. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gagarina, N., Armon-Lotem, S., Altman, C., Burstein-Feldman, Z., Klassert, A., Topaj, N., Golcher, F. & Walters, J.
(2014) Age, input quantity and their effect on linguistic performance in the home and societal language among Russian-German and Russian-Hebrew preschool children. In: R. K. Silbereisen, P. F. Titzmann, & Y. Shovit (eds.), The challenges of diaspora migration: Interdisciplinary perspectives on Israel and Germany (pp. 63–82). Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Gagarina, N., Posse, D., Düsterhöft, S., Golcher, F. & Topaj, N.
(2017) Bilingual lexicon development in German in preschool children with the home languages Russian and Turkish. In: H. Peukert & I. Gogolin (eds.), Dynamics of linguistic diversity. pp. 125–142. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gathercole, V. C. M., Thomas, E. M., Roberts, E. J., Hughes, C. O. & Hughes, E. K.
(2013) Why assessment needs to take exposure into account: Vocabulary and grammatical abilities in bilingual children. In: V. C. M. Gathercole (ed.), Issues in the assessment of bilinguals (pp. 20–55). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gopnik, A. & Choi, S.
(1995) Names, relational words and cognitive development in English and Korean speakers: Nouns are not always learned before verbs. In: M. Tomasello & W. Merriman (eds.), Beyond names for things: Young children’s acquisition of verbs (pp. 63–80). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Grasso, S. M., Peña, E. D., Bedore, L. M., Hixon, J. G. & Griffin, Z. M.
(2018) Cross-linguistic cognate production in Spanish-English bilingual children with and without language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Published ahead of print 19 February 2018. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Groenen, G. M.
(2011) The effects of internal and external factors and cognates on the vocabulary scores of Dutch-English bilingual children. Unpublished M.A. thesis. Utrecht: Utrecht University.Google Scholar
Haman, E., Łuniewska, M., Hansen, P., Simonsen, H. G., Chiat, S., Bjekić, J., Blažienė, A., Chyl, K., Dabašinskienė, I., Engel de Abreu, P., Gagarina, N., Gavarró, A., Håkansson, G., Harel, E., Holm, E., Kapalková, S., Kunnari, S., Levorato, C., Lindgren, J., Mieszkowska, K., Montes Salarich, L., Potgieter, A., Ribu, I., Ringblom, N., Rinker, T., Roch, M., Slančová, D., Southwood, F., Tedeschi, R., Tuncer, A. M., Ünal-Logacev, Ö., Vuksanović, J. & Armon-Lotem, S.
(2017) Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from cross-linguistic lexical tasks (LITMUS-CLT). Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 31(11–12), 818–843. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haman, E., Łuniewska, M. & Pomiechowska, B.
(2015) Designing cross-linguistic lexical tasks (CLTs) for bilingual preschool children. In: S. Armon-Lotem, J. de Jong, & N. Meir (eds.), Methods for assessing multilingual children: disentangling bilingualism from Language Impairment (pp. 196–239). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haman, E., Wodniecka, Z., Marecka, M., Szewczyk, J., Białecka-Pikul, M., Otwinowska, A., Mieszkowska, K., Łuniewska, M., Kołak, J., Miękisz, A., Kacprzak, A., Banasik, N. & Foryś-Nogala, M.
(2017) How does L1 and L2 exposure impact L1 performance in bilingual children? Evidence from Polish-English migrants to the United Kingdom. Frontiers in Psychology 81. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hansen, P., Simonsen, H. G., Łuniewska, M., & Haman, E.
(2017) Validating the psycholinguistic aspects of LITMUS-CLT: Evidence from Polish and Norwegian. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 31(11–12), 910–930. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoff, E., Core, C., Place, S., Rumiche, R., Señor, M. & Parra, M.
(2012) Dual language exposure and early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language 39(1), 1–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hoff, E., Rumiche, R., Burridge, A., Ribot, K. M. & Welsh, S. N.
(2014) Expressive vocabulary development in children from bilingual and monolingual homes: A longitudinal study from two to four years. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 291, 433–444. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kelley, A. & Kohnert, K.
(2012) Is there a cognate advantage for typically developing Spanish-speaking English-language learners? Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools 43(2), 191–204. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kauschke, C., Lee, H.-W. & Pae, S.
(2007) Similarities and variation in noun and verb acquisition: A crosslinguistic study of children learning German, Korean, and Turkish. Language and Cognitive Processes 22(7), 1045–1072. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klassert, A., Gagarina, N. & Kauschke, C.
(2014) Object and action naming in Russian and German-speaking monolingual and bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 17(1), 73–88. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kohnert, K., Windsor, J. & Miller, R.
(2004) Crossing borders: Recognition of Spanish words by English speaking children with and without language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics 25(4), 543–564. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leseman, P. P. M.
(2000) Bilingual vocabulary development of Turkish preschoolers in the Netherlands. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 21(2), 93–112. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lindgren, J.
(2017) Ordförrådsutveckling hos förskolebarn med svenska som modersmål: En studie med Cross-linguistic Lexical Task (CLT) [Vocabulary development in preschool children with Swedish as mother tongue: A study with Cross-linguistic Lexical Task (CLT)]. In: E. Sköldberg, M. Andréasson, H. Adamsson Eryd, F. Lindahl, J. Prentice, S. Lindström & M. Sandberg (eds.), Svenskans beskrivning 35: förhandlingar vid trettiofemte sammankomsten Göteborg 11–13 maj 2016 (pp. 161–174). Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg.Google Scholar
(2018) Developing narrative competence: Swedish, Swedish-German and Swedish-Turkish children aged 4–6. Ph.D. thesis, Uppsala: Uppsala University.Google Scholar
Lotto, L. & de Groot, A. M. B.
(1998) Effects of learning method and word type on acquiring vocabulary in an unfamiliar language. Language Learning 48(1), 31–69. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Łuniewska, M., Haman, E., Armon-Lotem, S., Etenkowski, B., Southwood, F., Anđelković, D., Blom, E., Boerma, T., Chiat, S., de Abreu, P. E., Gagarina, N., Gavarró, A., Håkansson, G., Hickey, T., Jensen de López, K., Marinis, T., Popović, M., Thordardottir, T., Blažienė, A., Cantú Sánchez, M., Dabašinskienė, I., Ege, P., Ehret, I.-A., Fritsche, N.-A., Gatt, D., Janssen, B., Kambanaros, M., Kapalková, S., Kronqvist, B., Kunnari, S., Levorato, C., Nenonen, O., Nic Fhlannchadha, S., O’Toole, C., Polišenská, K., Pomiechowska, B., Ringblom, N., Rinker, T., Roch, M., Savić, M., Slančová, D., Tsimpli, I. A., & Ünal-Logacev, Ö.
(2016) Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages: Is there a cross-linguistic order of words? Behavior Research Methods 481, 1154–1177. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montanari, E. G., Abel, R., Graßer, B. & Tschudinovski, L.
(2018) Do bilinguals create two different sets of vocabulary for two domains? Vocabulary development and overlap in the first years of schooling. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 8(4), 502–522. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Otwinowska, A.
(2016) Cognate vocabulary in language acquisition and use: Attitudes, awareness, activation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Parkvall, M.
(2015) Sveriges språk i siffror: vilka språk talas och av hur många? [Sweden’s languages in numbers: which languages are spoken and by how many speakers?]. Stockholm: Språkrådet/Morfem.Google Scholar
Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, S. C., Lewedag, V. & Oller, D. K.
(1997) The relation of input factors to lexical learning by bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics 18 (1), 41–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pérez, A. M., Peña, E. D. & Bedore, L. M.
(2010) Cognates facilitate word recognition in young Spanish-English bilinguals’ test performance. Early Childhood Services 4(1), 55–67.Google Scholar
Prevoo, M. J. L., Malda, M., Mesman, J., Emmen, R. A. G., Yeniad, N., Van Ijzendoorn, M. H. & Linting, M.
(2014) Predicting ethnic minority children’s vocabulary from socioeconomic status, maternal language and home reading input: different pathways for host and ethnic language. Journal of Child Language 41(5), 963–984. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ringblom, N., Håkansson, G., & Lindgren, J.
(2014) Cross-Linguistic Lexical Task: Swedish version (CLT-SWE). Unpublished material.Google Scholar
Rinker, T., Budde-Spengler, N. & Sachse, S.
(2017) The relationship between L1 and L2 lexical development in young Turkish-German children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 20(2), 218–233. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rinker, T., & Gagarina, N.
(2014) Cross-Linguistic Lexical Task: German version (CLT-DE). Unpublished material.Google Scholar
Scheele, A. F., Leseman, P. P. M. & Mayo, A. Y.
(2010) The home language environment of monolingual and bilingual children and their language proficiency. Applied Psycholinguistics 31(1), 117–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schelletter, C.
(2002) The effect of form similarity on bilingual children’s lexical development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 5(2), 93–107. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sheng, L., Lam, B. P. W., Cruz, D. & Fulton, A.
(2016) A robust demonstration of the cognate facilitation effect in first-language and second-language naming. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 1411, 229–238. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sherkina-Lieber, M.
(2004) The cognate facilitation effect in bilingual speech processing: The case of Russian-English bilingualism. Cahiers Linguistiques d’Ottawa 321, 108–121.Google Scholar
Stadthagen-González, H., Gathercole, V. C. M., Pérez-Tattam, R. & Yavas, F.
(2013) Vocabulary assessment of bilingual adults: To cognate or not to cognate. In: V. C. M. Gathercole (ed.), Solutions for the assessment of bilinguals (pp. 125–145). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Statistics Sweden
(2017) Statistikdatabasen. Retrieved 22 March 2018 from [URL]
Sweet, H.
(1899) The practical study of languages: A guide for teachers and learners. London: J.M. Dent.Google Scholar
Thordardottir, E.
(2011) The relationship between bilingual exposure and vocabulary development. International Journal of Bilingualism 15(4), 426–445. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tonzar, C., Lotto, L. & Job, R.
(2009) L2 vocabulary acquisition in children: Effects of learning method and cognate status. Language Learning 59(3), 623–646. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Uccelli, P. & Páez, M. M.
(2007) Narrative and vocabulary development of bilingual children from kindergarten to first grade: Developmental changes and associations among English and Spanish skills. Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools 38(3), 225–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Umbel, V. M., Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, M. C. & Oller, D. K.
(1992) Measuring bilingual children’s receptive vocabularies. Child Development 631, 1012–1020. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vermeer, A.
(2001) Breadth and depth of vocabulary in relation to L1/L2 acquisition and frequency of input. Applied Psycholinguistics 22(2), 217–234. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 8 other publications

Bohnacker, Ute, Rima Haddad & Linnéa Öberg
2021. Arabic-Swedish-Speaking Children Living in Sweden: Vocabulary Skills in Relation to Age, SES and Language Exposure. Journal of Home Language Research 4:1 DOI logo
Hadley, Elizabeth Burke, Robert F. Dedrick, David K. Dickinson, Eunsook Kim, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek & Roberta Michnick Golinkoff
2021. Exploring the relations between child and word characteristics and preschoolers' word-learning. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 77 ► pp. 101332 ff. DOI logo
Håkansson, Gisela & Birgitta Waters
2021. A case study of a quadrilingual child. In Language Impairment in Multilingual Settings [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 29], ► pp. 78 ff. DOI logo
Knopp, Eva
2022. Effects of Dominance in Exposure and Linguistic Distance in the Bilingual Proficiency Profiles of Dutch-German and Greek-German School-Age Bilinguals. Journal of Home Language Research 5:1 DOI logo
Lindgren, Josefin & Ute Bohnacker
2020. Inferential comprehension, age and language. In Developing Narrative Comprehension [Studies in Bilingualism, 61], ► pp. 62 ff. DOI logo
Lindgren, Josefin & Ute Bohnacker
2021. How do age, language, narrative task, language proficiency and exposure affect narrative macrostructure in German-Swedish bilingual children aged 4 to 6?. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism DOI logo
Roch, Maja & Gordana Hržica
2020. Narrative comprehension by Croatian-Italian bilingual children 5–7 years old. In Developing Narrative Comprehension [Studies in Bilingualism, 61], ► pp. 172 ff. DOI logo
ÇAĞLAR, Ozan Can, Esra ATAMAN & Bilal KIRKICI
2021. The Processing of English-Turkish (False) Cognates: Evidence from a Backward Lexical Translation Task. Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 15:2 ► pp. 293 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.