Arabic-Swedish-Speaking Children Living in Sweden: Vocabulary Skills in Relation to Age, SES and Language Exposure

Abstract

This paper investigates the receptive and expressive vocabulary skills of 100 Arabic-Swedish-speaking children ages 4;0–7;11 growing up in Sweden. We explore how vocabulary in this under-researched population is affected by age, socio-economic status (SES), age of onset, daily exposure and home language use in the family (parents, siblings, extended family and friends) and via mother tongue instruction. Comprehension and production of nouns and verbs were assessed with the Arabic and Swedish versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs; Haman et al., 2015). Background information was collected via a parental questionnaire. In our cross-sectional study, comprehension was better in the minority home language (Arabic) than in the majority language (Swedish) for the youngest (4-year-old children), but this difference levelled out at ages 5, 6 and 7. There was a clear and positive effect of age on receptive and expressive vocabulary scores in both languages. For neither language was there any effect of SES (parental education). Age of onset and daily exposure had a measurable effect on Swedish vocabulary scores, whilst for Arabic, daily exposure and input in the home played an important role: Children whose parents mostly spoke Arabic to them had significantly higher Arabic vocabulary scores than other children. The complex interplay of environmental and individual-level factors on vocabulary skills is also illustrated by four case studies. These results from a Swedish context complement vocabulary studies of other language combinations and reveal the importance of input for the development of vocabulary in bilingual children.