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CC BY 4.0 · Journal of Child Science 2022; 12(01): e47-e54
DOI: 10.1055/s-0042-1743493
Original Article

Estimating the Lexical Breadth and Depth in Bilingual Indian Children Aged between 5 and 11 Years of Age

Priya Pauline Rego
1   Department of Audiology and Speech Language Pathology, Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, Karnataka, India
,
Sudhin Karuppali 
1   Department of Audiology and Speech Language Pathology, Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, Karnataka, India
,
Jayashree S. Bhat
1   Department of Audiology and Speech Language Pathology, Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal, Karnataka, India
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Abstract

Objectives Lexical breadth of knowledge is the quantity of words that the individual knows with regard to vocabulary size of the learner; while lexical depth is the learner's knowledge and mastery level of various semantic relations of a given word. Both measures have been used in the assessment of speaking/writing skills of first (L1) and second (L2) language users. The current study aims to explore the lexical knowledge of typically developing school going bilingual Indian children.

Methods Seventy-two Konkani (L1) and English (L2) speaking children (between 5 and 11 years of age) were recruited in the study. The study was performed in three phases. Phase 1 comprised of developing the experimental tasks (lexical breadth and lexical depth); phase 2 included the data collection; and phase 3 focused on data and statistical analysis. Mean and standard deviation of the total number of words and total number of different words were analyzed. Two-way repeated measures analysis of variance test was done to assess the level of significance (p < 0.05) across the groups for both tasks. Paired t-test was done to assess the interaction effect between age and language.

Results The results indicated an overall increase in lexical breadth and depth across age for L1 and L2. The interaction between the two languages has been discussed in detail.

Conclusion The findings of this study may help pave way toward future explorations to address issues pertaining to the complex interaction of L1 and L2 languages in bilinguals.

Keywords

bilinguals - English - Indian - Konkani - lexical depth - lexical breadth

Authors’ Contributions

P.P.R. was involved in data collection. S.K. and J.S.B. were involved in conceptual planning, analysis, manuscript preparation, and overall proofreading.




Publication History

Received: 01 September 2020

Accepted: 05 January 2022

Article published online:
07 July 2022

© 2022. The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, permitting unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction so long as the original work is properly cited. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Georg Thieme Verlag KG
Rüdigerstraße 14, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany

 

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