De relatie tussen educatieve gesprekken en Nederlandse receptieve woordenschat bij 3- en 6-jarige tweetalige kinderen

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between language input and receptive vocabulary for bilingual children. The research question therefore is: “What is the relation between educational conversations between parent and child, and Dutch receptive vocabulary for children aged 3 and 6 years, from Turkish-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch families?”. Previous research shows that bilingual children often fall behind in their second language (Sierens et al., 2019). In the literature there is no consensus about the relationship between exposure to the children’s language input and the development of the receptive vocabulary in the second language (e.g. August et al., 2006; Hoff & Core, 2013). To answer the research question families from Turkish-Dutch, Moroccan-Dutch and Dutch families were selected by a stratified sample, based on socioeconomic status, in three big cities in the Netherlands and approached via post. A total of 165 families participated in the study. Data were collected by female student-assistants, through semi-structured interviews and the Diagnostic Test Bilingualism (Verhoeven et al., 1995). Results show no correlation between language input in their first language and receptive vocabulary, nor for language input in their second language and receptive vocabulary. However, a significant positive correlation is found for Turkish-Dutch 3-year-olds, between Dutch language input and Dutch receptive vocabulary. More research is needed to explore the relationship between different forms of language input and receptive vocabulary for bilingual children, and in future studies a distinction should be made between different ethnical backgrounds.