The Language Exposure Assessment Tool: Quantifying Language Exposure in Infants and Children

Dog or chien? Translation equivalents in the receptive and expressive vocabularies of young French-English bilinguals

In order to address gaps in the literature surrounding the acquisition of translation equivalents (TEs) in young bilinguals, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, TEs were measured in the expressive vocabularies of thirty-four French-English bilinguals at 1;4, 1;10, and 2;6 using the MacArthur Bates CDI. Children's acquisition of TEs occurred gradually, with more balanced ratios of exposure and vocabulary associated with larger proportions of TEs at each wave. Experiment 2 compared a direct measure of TE comprehension with parent report of the same set of words. Results showed that parents may over-report children's TE comprehension, as our sample of two-year-old French-English bilinguals (n = 20) comprehended fewer TEs on a direct measure of receptive vocabulary than parents reported on the vocabulary checklist. The present study provides an original contribution to the literature on bilingual vocabulary development by employing both a longitudinal design and a direct measure of TE comprehension.

Assessing a continuum of lexical-semantic knowledge in the second year of life: A multimodal approach

Behavioral dissociations in young children's visual and haptic responses have been taken as evidence that word knowledge is not all-or-none but instead exists on a continuum from absence of knowledge, to partial knowledge, to robust knowledge. This longitudinal study tested a group of 16- to 18-month-olds, 6months after their initial visit, to replicate results of partial understanding as shown by visual-haptic dissociations and to determine whether partial knowledge of word-referent relations can be leveraged for future word recognition. Results show that, like 16-month-olds, 22-month-olds demonstrate behavioral dissociations exhibited by rapid visual reaction times to a named referent but incorrect haptic responses. Furthermore, results suggest that partial word knowledge at one time predicts the degree to which that word will be understood in the future.