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Lexical Development In Bilingual Infants And Toddlers: Comparison To Monolingual Norms, Barbara Zurer Pearson, Sylvia C. Fernandez, D.Kimbrough Oller

Barbara Zurer Pearson

This study compares lexical development in a sample of 25 simultaneous bilingual and 35 monolingual children for whom semilongitudinal data were collected between the ages of 8 and 30 months. A standardized parent report form, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (1989), was used to assess the children's receptive and productive vocabulary in English and/or Spanish. A methodology was devised to assess the degree of overlap between the bilingual children's lexical knowledge in one language and their knowledge in the other. Using the measures presented here, there was no statistical basis for concluding that the bilingual children were slower to develop …