NorPhLex

Projects at the University of Oslo

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DEVELOPMENT OF LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL KNOWLEDGE IN BILINGUAL MINORITY CHILDREN IN NORWAY

Background

•  Norway is a multicultural and -lingual society •  Need for more knowledge about

–  language aqcuisition in general –  multilingual language acquisition

•  Need for screening instruments –  to identify language skills and language

impairment in multilingual speakers

Questions

•  What specific lexical and grammatical knowledge do the bilingual children participating in the project have in their two languages?

•  What is the role of the minority language in the children’s acquisition of Norwegian (lexicon and grammar)?

•  How does the bilingual child’s acquisition of Norwegian compare to acquisition of lexicon and grammar by monolingual learners of Norwegian?

Questions (cont.)

•  When, if at all, do minority preschool children learning Norwegian catch up with their monolingual Norwegian learning peers?

•  What assessment methods will most efficiently measure language skills in bilingual children, and also identify bilingual children at risk for language disorders?

Participants, design and data

•  Participants: –  40 TD bilingual children with Turkish as L1 and Norwegian

as L2 –  40 TD monolingual children acquiring Norwegian

•  Longitudinal design: –  Data collection every 3rd month over 2 years

•  Data types: –  spontaneous language samples –  parental reports –  experiments and tests

Language measures

•  Norwegian –  Vocabulary comprehension (BPVS-N) –  Grammatical comprehension (TROG2-N) –  Vocabulary and grammar (MBCDI-N)

•  Turkish: –  Vocabulary comprehension (PPVS-T) –  Grammatical comprehension (TELD-3-T) –  Vocabulary and grammar (MBCDI-T)