Comparison of Spanish, English, and Bilingual Children's Performance Across Semantic Tasks

This study investigated predominantly Spanish-speaking, predominantly English-speaking, and Spanish-English bilingual children's performance on a battery of semantic tasks.

Six semantic tasks (associations, characteristic properties, categorization, functions, linguistic concepts, and similarities and differences) were developed in Spanish and English. The tasks contained comparable items but were not direct translations of each other. Each task consisted of expressive and receptive items. Predominantly Spanish-speaking children completed the tasks in Spanish, predominantly English-speaking children completed the tasks in English, and bilingual children completed the tasks in Spanish and English.

Children in all three groups achieved similar average levels of performance on the assessment battery. However, there were differences in the patterns of performance for English and Spanish, as well as group performance differences when compared in the same language.

These findings highlight the importance of testing bilingual children in both of their languages and across a variety of semantic tasks in order to gain insight into bilingual children's semantic knowledge.