Vocabulary assessment in bilingual children

[Pascale Engel]

Dear Leher,

I have done exactly what you suggested (used version A and B of the PPVT)
with Portuguese-Luxembourgish bilinguals (8 year-olds) and it worked quite
well. We will now compare the data to monolingual speakers from Luxembourg
and Portugal.

One thing I would be concerned about when comparing task performance in the
same individual across languages using different versions of a test is that
you can not be sure that word frequencies are controlled.  At least this was
the case for Luxembourgish and Portuguese for which no norms on the PPVT
exist - maybe for Mandarin this is different . Also in case there is not a
published Mandarin version of the PPVT you might want to keep in mind that
Pearson charges a relatively steep translation fee.

Have you considered using an expressive vocabulary test? This would
partially get you around the problem of administrating exactly the same test
twice to the same kids. In addition it would give you some interesting
information on the lexical knowledge that is shared across languages and
that is specific to each language.

Best of luck with your work,

-- 
 *Pascale Engel de Abreu - PhD*
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
* *
Tel: 46 6644 9779
*http://pascaleengel.blogspot.com/* <http://pascaleengel.blogspot.com/>
*http://memoriaoperacional.blogspot.com*<http://memoriaoperacional.blogspot.com/>
* *
University of Luxembourg - EMACS
B.P.2 L-7201 Walferdange
G.D. de Luxembourg


On 19 July 2011 09:52, Leher Singh <leher.singh at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Dear all,
>
> We are looking for ways to assess receptive vocabulary in bilingual
> children (30 and 36 months) in each of their languages (Mandarin Chinese and
> English). We are looking for a way to administer a vocabulary test to
> estimate vocabulary sizes in each language. Essentially, we want to
> compare receptive vocabulary across languages to get a sense of dominance
> with which to associate our experimental data on word recognition. One idea
> we have considered is to administer the PPVT version A in English/Mandarin
> and version B in the other language, but any other ideas would be much
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks, Leher
>
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