The role of translation equivalents in bilingual word learning

Abstract

Bilingual environments present an important context for word learning. One feature of bilingual environments is the existence of translation equivalents (TEs)—words in different languages that share similar meanings. Documenting TE learning over development may give us insight into the mechanisms underlying word learning in young bilingual children. Prior studies of TE learning have often been confounded by the fact that increases in overall vocabulary size with age lead to greater opportunities for learning TEs. To address this confound, we employed an item-level analysis, which controls for the age trajectory of each item independently. We used Communicative Development Inventory data from four bilingual datasets (two English–Spanish and two English–French; total N = 419) for modeling. Results indicated that knowing a word's TE increased the likelihood of knowing that word for younger children and for TEs that are more similar phonologically. These effects were consistent across datasets, but varied across lexical categories. Thus, TEs may allow bilingual children to bootstrap their early word learning in one language using their knowledge of the other language.

Research highlights

• Bilingual children must learn words that share a common meaning across both languages, that is, translation equivalents, like dog in English and perro in Spanish.
• Item-level models explored how translation equivalents affect word learning, in addition to child-level (e.g., exposure) and item-level (e.g., phonological similarity) factors.
• Knowing a word increased the probability of knowing its corresponding translation equivalent, particularly for younger children and for more phonologically-similar translation equivalents.
• These findings suggest that young bilingual children use their word knowledge in one language to bootstrap their learning of words in the other language.