A case study of a quadrilingual child
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Gisela Håkansson
Abstract
This paper reports on a case study of a quadrilingual child, Stefan, born and raised in Sweden and exposed to four languages before his first birthday: English, French, Russian and Swedish. We examine his vocabularies in these languages by the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (Haman, Łuniewska, & Pomiechowska, 2015), designed to measure vocabulary in monolingual and multilingual children. Stefan’s scores on comprehension and production reveal proficiency in all his languages, to varying degrees, and with comprehension exceeding production. While highlighting direct and indirect exposure as explanation for the variation in proficiency, we also discuss cognate vocabulary as an important factor for multilingual language development. In the production tasks, Stefan demonstrates not only vocabulary knowledge but also language-specific use of morphosyntax.
Abstract
This paper reports on a case study of a quadrilingual child, Stefan, born and raised in Sweden and exposed to four languages before his first birthday: English, French, Russian and Swedish. We examine his vocabularies in these languages by the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (Haman, Łuniewska, & Pomiechowska, 2015), designed to measure vocabulary in monolingual and multilingual children. Stefan’s scores on comprehension and production reveal proficiency in all his languages, to varying degrees, and with comprehension exceeding production. While highlighting direct and indirect exposure as explanation for the variation in proficiency, we also discuss cognate vocabulary as an important factor for multilingual language development. In the production tasks, Stefan demonstrates not only vocabulary knowledge but also language-specific use of morphosyntax.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
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Part I. LITMUS in typical bilingual development
- MAIN story comprehension 13
- How oral texts are organized in monolingual and heritage Russian 47
- A case study of a quadrilingual child 77
- Lexical diversity in bilingual speakers of Croatian and Italian 99
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Part II. Using LITMUS for identifying SLI (DLD)
- Language performance of sequential bilinguals on an Irish and English sentence repetition task 131
- Identification of bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment in France 169
- Effects of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and bilingualism on verbal short-term memory 197
- The influence of different first languages on LITMUS nonword-repetition and sentence repetition in second language French and second language German 227
- Phonology and sentential semantics 263
- Crosslinguistic nonword repetition and narrative performance over time 301
- Index 329
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
-
Part I. LITMUS in typical bilingual development
- MAIN story comprehension 13
- How oral texts are organized in monolingual and heritage Russian 47
- A case study of a quadrilingual child 77
- Lexical diversity in bilingual speakers of Croatian and Italian 99
-
Part II. Using LITMUS for identifying SLI (DLD)
- Language performance of sequential bilinguals on an Irish and English sentence repetition task 131
- Identification of bilingual children with Specific Language Impairment in France 169
- Effects of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and bilingualism on verbal short-term memory 197
- The influence of different first languages on LITMUS nonword-repetition and sentence repetition in second language French and second language German 227
- Phonology and sentential semantics 263
- Crosslinguistic nonword repetition and narrative performance over time 301
- Index 329
