Multilingualism, Acquisition, and Development (MAD) colloquium: Modelling Early Monolingual and Bilingual Vocabulary Acquisition in Polish: The Role of Word Properties

Abstract

Language development research shows that words that are more frequent, more concrete, and more relevant to babies (e.g., cat, bye, woof) are acquired earlier than those less frequent and more abstract (e.g., always). These effects have been found in several languages, but have not been extensively examined in Polish infants and toddlers. The aim of this talk is to present the study that investigated psycholinguistic predictors of early word knowledge in Polish monolingual and Polish-Norwegian bilingual children aged 18 to 36 months using data from parental reports (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories). The first part of the study examines the effects of word frequency, concreteness, and babiness on word production, and how these effects vary across age and lexical categories. The second part investigates whether these effects differ between monolingual and bilingual children. Finally, the study compares models using concreteness and babiness ratings collected from Polish and English speakers. The findings extend previous research indicating common mechanisms of vocabulary development in Polish monolingual and bilingual children but also highlight that bilinguals may be more sensitive to certain psycholinguistic properties than monolinguals.

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