Theory

1. Umbel, Pearson, Fernandez, and Oiler (1992). Measuring Bilingual Children's Receptive Vocabularies Theory Bilingual children's receptive vocabulary performance is influenced by home language experience. Method --105 Spanish-English bilingual 1st graders: (OSH n = 31, ESH n = 74 ) --questionnaire provided information including language(s) spoken at home and SES. --2 tests administered: PPVT-R and TVIP-H (a Spanish adaptation of the PPVT-R). --Translation equivalent (TE) analysis to identify “singlets” (words known in one language but not the other) Key Insight Findings: --Occupation level was found to be significantly related to PPVT-R performance, but not to TVIP-H performance. -- ESH group outperformed the OSH group on the PPVT-R even after controlling for differences on OL., but TVIP-H scores were comparable. --PPVT-R performance of both OSH and ESH group children was below that of the normingsample, but TVIP-H was comparable. --ESH had more TE words right in both languages, and OSH had more TE words wrong in both languages, but groups performed similarly on singlet vocabulary. Suggests that lexical knowledge is distributed disjunc- tively between two languages. --cognatestends to decrease the occurrence of singlets. --sociocultural context: bilinguality in Miami may be "additive;” learning of a majority language does not encroach on the heritage language (Lambert, 1977). Strengths --Uses cross-linguistic standardized tests to evaluate vocabulary knowledge of children in both their languages --Uses translation equivalents to address disjunction. Weaknesses --OSH parents held lower-status occupations. OL Factor was statistically controlled for, but may be many confounding factors not measured by the study. --Study did not clearly indicate length or degree of exposure to English within groups. --Tomayo(1987): a test translation that preserves meaning of the original items but not their relative frequency has poor concurrent validity w/ the original instrument