Language-minority children's sensitivity to the semantic relations between words

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Bilingualism
• Child Language Acquisition

Background:

• Understanding bilingual language processing in children is crucial for educational and clinical practices.
• Spanish-speaking language-minority children often navigate distinct linguistic environments, impacting their language development.
• Semantic priming paradigms offer insights into the organization and activation of lexical-semantic information in the bilingual lexicon.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate automatic language processing mechanisms in Spanish-speaking language-minority children.
• To examine the occurrence and nature of within-language and cross-language semantic priming effects.
• To determine if translation priming occurs and how it relates to proficiency levels in Spanish and English.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a sample of 73 Spanish-speaking language-minority children (mean age 90.4 months).
• Administered two semantic priming tasks: an auditory lexical decision task and a looking-while-listening task.
• Assessed English and Spanish vocabulary proficiency to establish language dominance.

Main Results:

• Children demonstrated greater proficiency in English than in Spanish.
• Limited semantic priming effects were observed within English and from English to Spanish.
• Substantial translation priming effects were found from Spanish to English and vice versa, suggesting reliance on translation for meaning access.

Conclusions:

• Spanish-speaking children access meaning by translating from their less proficient language (Spanish) to their more proficient language (English).
• Evidence suggests simultaneous activation of both languages, indicating early development of shared semantic knowledge.
• Findings highlight the dynamic interplay between translation and semantic processing in bilingual children's language acquisition.