synonyms in a bilingual child's lexicon

[Marilyn Vihman]

Dear Teresa,

I attempted to address the question of when synonyms come in for a  
bilingual child in my 1985 paper, Language differentiation of a  
bilingual child (JChLg), although it was widely misinterpreted as an  
endorsement of the 'unitary' or 'fused representation' hypothesis of  
Volterra & Taeschner, 1978. In fact, I found that my son began to  
match words in one language with corresponding words in the other very  
early on (from about his 8th word, as I recall); the same can be seen  
in Deuchar & Quay's diary study (2000, OUP).

My paper implied, by its title and some of the discussion, that a  
bilingual child may not be 'differentiating' his two languages, even  
though I did try to show that the vocabularies were overlapping to a  
degree, not made up of complementary words/meanings. At least since  
Mehler et al. 1989 I realise that on the basis of prosody alone it is  
unlikely that a bilingual child would not in some sense have the  
languages marked as separate, although the issue of 'separate systems'  
- much discussed and still disputed in the literature (cf. Vihman  
2002, 'Getting started without a system', Intl. J of BIling) - is  
another issue.

I hope that's helpful!

-marilyn

On 15 Mar 2010, at 09:19, Maria Teresa Guasti wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
>
> I am trying to find out when do monolingual children start to learn  
> synonymous words in their language? Do bilingual children start to  
> do so in one language early than monolingual peers  Could you point  
> out to me some reference for this topic.
>
> Best
> Teresa
>
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