A case study of a quadrilingual child : The influence of exposure and cognates when developing multiple languages

• 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.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

simultaneous multilingualism

quadrilingual

Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks

vocabulary

exposure

cognates

distributed vocabulary

Humaniora

Humanities

Cognates

Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks

Distributed vocabulary

Exposure

Quadrilingual

Simultaneous multilingualism

Vocabulary

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kap (ämneskategori)