Developmental Differences in Lexical Decision Among Monolingual and Bilingual Children

Abstract

It has been shown that Bilingual students in the Dutch educational system have low levels of academic performance (CBS, 2008). Though many measures and interventions have been undertaken to improve their academic achievement, there are still obvious differences between the monolingual and the bilingual Dutch students (CBS, 2008). One of the main factors contributing to this circumstance appear to be that bilinguals Dutch children have lower Dutch language proficiency at the age at which they were tested. Previous studies show that bilinguals Dutch children have poor work knowledge (Appel and Vermeer, 1998; Verhallen and Schoonen, 1998; Verhoeven, 2000; Schoonen and Verhallen, 2008) however, did not take into consideration of the words belonging to different domains used in their experiments. Perhaps the bilingual children are only weak with words often used at home in their home language but tested in the school language. This paper attempts to verify this with a pilot experiment to examine the effect on bilingualism by bilingual Dutch children at primary school age with a word association task. The result of the test is contrary to the hypothesis.