Ordförrådsutveckling hos arabisk-svensktalande och turkisk-svensktalande barn i förskoleåldern och vid skolstart

Abstract

This paper investigates the receptive and expressive vocabulary skills of 202 Arabic/Swedish- speaking and Turkish/Swedish-speaking bilingual children aged 4–7 growing up in Sweden, in their home/minority language (Arabic, Turkish) and in Swedish. We explore how vocabulary is affected by age, age of onset, socio-economic status (SES), and minority language exposure in the family (via parents) and via home-language (mother tongue) instruction. The comprehension and production of nouns and verbs was assessed with the Arabic, Turkish and Swedish versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs, Haman et al. 2015). Background information was collected via a parental questionnaire. In this cross-sectional study, there was a clear and positive effect of age on receptive and expressive vocabulary scores, though the effect was more pronounced for the majority language Swedish, and less so for the home language. Length of exposure had a positive effect on Swedish scores. For minority language vocabulary, language use in the home played an important role: Children whose parents mostly spoke Arabic or Turkish to them had significantly higher vocabulary scores in Arabic/Turkish than other children. For neither language was there any effect of SES (parental education). These results from a Swedish context complement vocabulary studies of other language combinations and reveal the importance of input for the development of receptive and expressive vocabulary in bilingual children.