A Quantitative Study Comparing the Word Retrieval Speed of First Grade Monolingual English Speakers to Bilingual Spanish-English Speakers of Mexican Descent.

摘要

One area of the language system that currently concerns researchers is word retrieval in children. Assessment of bilingual students who are acquiring English is a complicated task due to the scarce number of tests normed on typically developing students of similar linguistic and cultural background. The problem is that the word retrieval skills of bilingual Spanish-English speaking children may be considerably different from their monolingual English speaking peers. The purpose of this quantitative, correlational, cross-sectional study was to compare the word retrieval skills of bilingual Spanish-English speaking ELL students to monolingual English-only speaking students to determine the maximum time required for each group to recall labels for pictures of familiar nouns and verbs. The goal was to uncover a correlation, if any, between bilingualism and word retrieval skills. The participants included students enrolled in first grade between the ages of 6 and 8 who began to learn English during their preschool years. All of the bilingual subjects were of Mexican descent for generalization purposes. Responses of 70 bilingual Spanish speakers and 70 monolingual English speakers of similar age were timed with a stopwatch as they name pictures of familiar objects and actions obtained from the Fourth Spanish-Bilingual Edition of the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test and the Fourth Edition of the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test. Standardized scores, percentile ranks, and age-equivalents were obtained. A generalized linear model was computed to analyze the data. Word retrieval characteristics of the monolingual and bilingual children were compared. The present study provided new insight into the relationship between language exposure and speed of word retrieval in young bilingual children.