Construction of the Malay Cross-linguistic Lexical Task: a preliminary report (original) (raw)
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Environmental Influences on a Malay Bilingual Child’s Syntactic Awareness
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Designing Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs) for bilingual preschool children
2015
This chapter addresses the need for comparable measures of lexical knowledge in both languages of a bilingual child. Typically, tools designed to identify SLI do not take into account if a child is bilingual and how this might affect raw test scores, often leading to misdiagnosis. Both vocabulary size and processing speed can be confounding variables when diagnosticians attempt to disentangle bilingualism from SLI at the lexical level. Lexical abilities can also be used as a baseline assessment of bilingual dominance/proficiency. Hence the need for such tools as we describe here. Delayed and impaired lexical abilities are among the earliest indicators of SLI (Leonard, 1998). Children with SLI show a delay in lexical development both in terms of the overall number of words and in reaching lexical milestones (i.e. first 50, 100, 200 words, Leonard & Deevy, 2004). They also display relatively weak semantic categories (McGregor et al., 2002). Bilingual children often have smaller lexicons in both of their languages (Bialystok et al., 2010) when compared to monolinguals. However, the number of words in the two languages of a bilingual child added together may not be different from those measured by monolingual norms (Marchman et al., 2009). The processing load in lexical tasks as measured by reaction time is claimed to be higher in bilinguals than in monolinguals (Bialystok et al., 2008, Chen, 1990; Dijkstra, 2003; Kohnert & Bates, 2002). At the same time, children with SLI experience reduced processing capabilities in comparison with typically developing children (Lahey et al., 2001; Lahey & Edwards, 1996; Montgomery, 2002). Lexical abilities are potentially an early identification measure of bilingual SLI (Gatt et al., 2008), although they should not be used as the only diagnostic variable for this purpose (Gray et al., 1999; Spaulding et al., 2013). The assessment of processing speed and accuracy in lexical tasks may enhance the identification process (Pérez et al., 2013). The Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs) designed within COST Action IS0804 were conceived to provide a fully comparable assessment for vocabulary and lexical processing in 34 different languages. We present the innovative method of the CLTs´ construction: a multilingual parallel task construction procedure which enables an objective test of vocabulary and processing skills in any pair of languages included in the process. The CLTs target comprehension and production of nouns and verbs. The response accuracy measured in the CLTs indicates the level of receptive and expressive vocabulary size. Measuring reaction time (i.e. comprehension and naming speed) provides insight into the processing demands of passive and active knowledge across the two word classes. Picture choice and picture naming were chosen as being tasks least involving other types of linguistic or conceptual skills. Currently, the CLTs have been prepared for 21 of the 34 languages and are available for use by researchers. Their use in diagnostics will be warranted as soon as norming studies addressing specific populations of mono- and bilingual children have been completed.