Article Review -. Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children

Article Review
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Article Review: Receptive Vocabulary Differences in Monolingual and Bilingual Children
Even though there are numerous advantages of being bilingual, educators and parents show concern when it comes to whether bilingual children will have a wide vocabulary as their monolingual counterparts. However much time is allocated toward justifying and describing bilingualism, the underlying question remains: Do bilingual children have an extensive vocabulary?
Article Summary
In their 2010 article titled Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children: Language and Cognition, York University researchers and bilingualism specialists, Ellen Bialystok, Sujin Yang, Gigi Luk, and Kathleen F. Peets report the findings of an analysis in which they examine the differences in receptive vocabulary between bilingual and monolingual children.
The researchers examined the English receptive vocabulary of 1,738 children, who were the study’s main participants. These children were aged between three and ten years, and English was their school language. Of the 1,738 children, 966 were bilingual speakers, and 722 were English monolingual speakers. The researchers used the PPVT (Dunn, 1997) to compare bilingual and monolingual children on an extensive variety of cognitive and linguistic tasks. The tasks required the children to point out one out of four pictures that represents a word given by the experimenter. From this task, the experimenters concluded that bilingual children know fewer words in their language than in English, whereas monolingual children knew more words. In attempts of understanding this finding, the researchers examined the findings by domain: the home domain used words like (“camper” and “squash”) while the school domain incorporated words like (“writing,” “astronaut,” “rectangle,” et cetera). The results obtained demonstrated that there was a difference between bilinguals and monolinguals in the home domain. In my opinion, this is normal because bilingual children use their language in the home setting; thus, they are not familiar with English home words. In contrast, in the school domain, a domain in which both groups use English, the bilingual and monolingual children exhibited similar results. The researchers concluded that in the academic use of English, bilingual children are not disadvantaged (Bialystok et al., 2005).
At the end of the analysis, the researchers emphasized that is vital to establish that the vocabulary of bilingual children is somewhat limited (they know fewer words) compared to their monolingual counterparts – especially when they are both being educated using the English language. However, this difference does not interfere with the development of their lexical or verbal skills.
Strengths
The main merit of this article is how it examines lexical knowledge in bilingual children. In my opinion, the article’s strength is how it uses the PPTV test which is easy to oversee ...