engleski

Interculturalism in Bilingual Lexical Development

When describing children’ s lexical development usually the main questions raised are the rate of acquisition, the vocabulary size, the conceptual coverage, the linguistic sophistication including the influence which gender, input, socioeconomic status and culture have on it. When it comes to bilingualism, being a complex phenomenon, additional questions are raised and a more detailed, multileveled model of describing bilingual lexical development is needed. In bilingual/multilingual society bilinguals interact with other speakers in a complex network of interaction which was proven to be difficult to describe and explain. Research on bilingualism usually distinguished two dimensions: large-scale analyses of multilingual societies and analysis of the setting in which bilingual speakers interact. Although, the social component is beyond question most of the researches have primarily been focused on the linguistic aspect of bilingual lexical development. The importance of the link between the social component and language should not be underestimated. Language embodies cultural reality which is even more evident during the developmental processes. Only by including all these aspects a proper and complete description of bilingual language development could be achieved. This longitudinal study was conducted with the aim to investigate language development of monolingual and bilingual children through various (verbal and nonverbal) tasks. The same children were followed four years from the first to fourth grade of elementary school. Although, our research was primarily focused on the linguistic aspects, when analysing the data it became obvious that culture has an important impact, especially on lexical development. This is in particular evident in bilingual environment. The effect can be seen both on lexical production and comprehension. The study included three groups of children: monolingual Croatian children (N = 300) and two groups of bilingual children: children from bilingual community in Croatia (N = 119, languages: Italian/Croatian) and in Austria (N = 111, languages: Croatian/German). The bilingual children differ regarding the status of their languages in their language community (e.g. family language, the ambient language, language of education etc.). The best results were achieved by bilingual children in Croatia, both in language reception and production, while the less successful were the Austrian bilingual group. The offered interpretation of the differences in the results stresses the importance of the sociocultural status of the two languages in each bilingual/multilingual community. If the two languages are equally positively valued, the child’ s language development will obtain the maximum benefit from the bilingual experience leading to a better performance compared to their monolingual peers. On the other hand, if one of the languages is socioculturally devalued, bilingual children could show delay in language development compared to monolingual peers.

lexical development; bilingualism; interculturalism

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