Conceptual Versus Monolingual Scoring: When Does It Make a Difference?

Area of Science:

• Child Language Acquisition
• Bilingualism Research
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Understanding semantic development in bilingual children is crucial for accurate language assessment.
• Existing assessment methods may not fully capture the nuances of bilingual semantic skills.
• The study addresses the comparability of semantic responses across two languages in bilingual children.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate response overlap in semantic tasks for bilingual children across their languages.
• To determine if monolingual or conceptual scoring accurately classifies semantic development in typically developing (TD) bilingual children.

Main Methods:

• Study 1: 55 TD bilingual children (4-7 years) named item properties; response overlap and errors were analyzed.
• Study 2: 40 TD bilingual children (5-6 years) completed the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA); conceptual and monolingual scores were compared.
• Children were group-matched for age and bilingual language exposure.

Main Results:

• Bilingual children produced more unique than overlapping semantic responses.
• Code-switching was more frequent in Spanish; errors were more common in English.
• Conceptual scores were comparable between monolingual and bilingual children; conceptual scoring better reflected Spanish-speaking bilinguals' abilities.

Conclusions:

• Conceptual scoring is beneficial for assessing bilingual children's semantic skills, especially in Spanish.
• This scoring method provides a more accurate classification of semantic development for bilingual populations.
• Findings support the use of conceptual scoring to better understand bilingual language acquisition.