Vocabulary in bilingual acquisition throughout early and late childhood (5 - 13)
Résumé
Previous studies (see Backus, 2013) on Turkish bilingual children’s languages in European countries agree in affirming that these children face important problems at school of learning the language of the country in which they live. Indeed very young bilinguals encounter diffi-culties, but these are essentially limited to gaps in vocabulary (Crutzen & Manço, 2003).
In general, for lexical denomination tests, researches highlight significantly lower scores for young bilingual children stemming from Turkish migrant background in Europe compared to monolinguals. These results participated widely in conveying the idea that their bilingualism would cause delays in language acquisition.
For the vocabulary, things are far from being alarming since there is not any critical period for lexical acquisitions. Therefore, the increasing number of experiences for children, through early school attendance as well as their many contacts with French children, will allow them to quickly acquire vocabulary. Particular attention on the part of teachers to literacy activities in both languages could help these bilingual children to expand their vocabulary in their two languages (Cummins, 2014).
The subject of the symposium is the acquisition of vocabulary in bilingual contexts at school age (from 5 – 13 years). Schooling brings a dramatic shift of the bilingual input pattern to-wards a massive input in the schooling language, often the majority language, regarding the quantity of input and the needs and possibilities of acting in a language. In a pragmatic under-standing of language acquisition, schooling should therefore have a strong impact on the bi-lingual acquisition and specifically on lexicon acquisition. The interdependence hypothesis (Cummins 1979) and the Complementary Principle (Grosjean 2015) formulate assumptions on the structure of bilingual development, but up to now they have not been empirically con-firmed or rejected. These assumptions are discussed on the basis of cross-sectional and lon-gitudinal data from French-Turkish, German-Turkish, English-Turkish and monolingual com-parative data from four European countries (France, Germany, Great Britain, Turkey). The presentations follow the age of the participants of the studies from younger to older children.
The aim of the symposium is to improve knowledge about the acquisition of vocabulary at school age in different migration situations and to enhance the international comparability of results of the research on bilingual acquisition during childhood.