Bilingual Child Observation

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Klammler and Schneider (2011) examined two children: a bilingual German-Italian boy (MAN) and an Italian monolingual girl (DEL). Both subjects were almost identical in age only differing by one day. The two children were the only child in their families. In addition to this, both children live in families with a very similar socioeconomic background. In this study, they investigated the rate of acquisition, the size and the composition of productive lexicons. A five-month observation period was conducted were a collection of data was gathered in two ways: parental lexicon dairies and regular recording of spontaneous speech. Within parental lexicon dairies, the parents wrote down all new words produced and other relevant observations. Regular recording of spontaneous speech occurred throughout the observation period. …show more content…
The monolingual girl was recorded once a month. While, the bilingual boy MAN was recorded twice a month, one recording per language. For the bilingual child, the recordings were conducted as monolingual as possible, so either it only included the German-speaking mother or only the Italian-speaking father. One important thing noted in this study, is MAN spent two- three weeks in Austria with his grandparents. In the end, it was found that MAN had acquired twice as many words than the monolingual girl. However, there was not a striking difference regarding word categories in comparisons of the bilingual boy’s lexicon verse the monolingual child. They found a striking increase in that the rate of acquisition after they reached the size of about 50 words, this increase in vocabulary is known as a vocabulary