Annabelle David

Individual Differences in the Lexical Development of French-English Bilingual Children.

Abstract The large and rapidly expanding body of literature on bilingual acquisition is mostly comprised of either single-case or cross-sectional studies. While these studies have made major contributions to our understanding of bilingual childrens language development, they do not allow researchers to compare and contrast results with regard to individual differences over time. This paper aims to investigate the issue of individual differences with a longitudinal group study of 13 French–English bilingual children. The main focus is lexical development. We will examine how extralinguistic factors such as gender, parental input and birth order impact on the lexical development of the children. Using quantitative (parental checklists, questionnaires) and qualitative measures (interactions with parents), we demonstrate that language exposure and parental input are closely linked to vocabulary size, amount of language mixing and cross-linguistic synonyms. The findings call for more longitudinal group studies of bilingual acquisition in order to obtain comparable results on larger populations.

A developmental perspective on productive lexical knowledge in L2 oral interlanguage

This article reports on productive vocabulary development by instructed British learners of French over a five-year period (from age 13 to 18). Lexical diversity development was investigated through a semi-guided oral picture-based task. Results show that the students’ lexical diversity (as measured by D) did significantly improve throughout the five years showing little sign of slower periods. Overall more noun types were observed than verb types in the composition of the lexicon throughout the study but with a consistent decrease in its proportion after Year 10. Further results using the Limiting Relative Diversity measure indicate that learners vary their use of nouns to a much larger extent than verbs. The discussion focuses on the noun-bias hypothesis and the use of different elicitation tasks.

Lexical development in instructed L2 learners of French: Is there a relationship with morphosyntactic development?

Although a number of studies have documented French L2 development (e.g. Ayoun, 2007; Dewaele, 2005; Myles and Towell, 2004; Prevost and Paradis, 2004), most focus on one or more aspects of morphosyntax, and there is comparatively little research on lexical development in French as an L2 (but see David, 2008; Graham, Richards and Malvern, 2008; Milton, 2006; Richards, Malvern and Graham, 2008). Even fewer studies investigate the relationship between the development of morphosyntax and vocabulary and the role that the lexicon might play in morphosyntactic development. This relationship is of interest as it might have implications not only for language acquisition theory, but also for better understanding the relationship between the lexicon and syntax in natural languages. For instance, some recent theories of language suggest that the brain is modular and that the different modules (e.g. phonology, syntax and lexis) are independent from one another and do not interact with each other except at the level of interfaces (which are external to them) (Jackendoff, 2002). One of the implications for language acquisition is that the processes by which these modules are acquired might also be separate. Hence (second) language learners might develop their lexicon and morphosyntax independently from one another at different rates and at different times.