synonyms in a bilingual child's lexicon

[Elena Nicoladis]

Further indirect answers to Teresa's questions. In the two papers listed
below, we showed that bilingual children showed earlier pragmatic
differentiation than lexical differentiation. That is, they first
seemed to learn to speak a language with a particular person and THEN
they learned a bunch of translation equivalents.

While these are small samples so not necessarily generalizable, these
results do lead to the possibility that children can learn synonyms if
they have some pragmatic reason to do so...

Cheers,
Elena

Nicoladis, E. (1998).  First clues to the existence of two input
languages:  Pragmatic and lexical differentiation in a bilingual
child.  Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1, 105-116.
Nicoladis, E. & Genesee, F. (1996).  A longitudinal study of
pragmatic differentiation in young bilingual children.  Language
Learning, 46, 439-464.



Quoting "Marilyn Vihman" <mv509 at york.ac.uk>:

> 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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***************************************
Elena Nicoladis, PhD
Department of Psychology
University of Alberta
P2-17 Biological Sciences Bdg.
Edmonton AB
T6G 2E9
CANADA

"Since all the sciences, and especially psychology, are still immersed  
in such tremendous realms of the uncertain and the unknown, the best  
that any individual scientist, especially any psychologist, can do  
seems to be to follow his own gleam and his own bent, however  
inadequate they may be. In the end, the only sure criterion is to have  
fun."
E. C. Tolman, 1959
***************************************

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