Tenth Heritage Language Research Institute

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Bilingual vocabulary acquisition in early childhood: The role of lexical bias

The early stages of lexical development pose various questions about the selection and application of reference assignment. In some proposals these processes are assumed to be facilitated by lexical biases that differ in strength in monolingual and bilingual populations (Markman, Wasow & Hansen, 2003). Particularly, the operation of a Mutual Exclusivity Bias (the use of one label for one object) has been found to be marginal or absent in bilinguals in contrast to its strong presence in monolinguals (Healey & Scarabela 2007, Houston-Price et al. 2010). In this presentation I will discuss the role and operation of lexical biases in bilingual vocabulary acquisition with a focus on simultaneous bilinguals. I will report the results of my longitudinal study of a 3-year old child who is acquiring Bulgarian and English from birth in the USA. I focus on his production of translation equivalents at three measurement points: 18, 24 and 30 months. His acquisition pattern reveals a domain-specific use of translation equivalents, a specific form of semantic underextension. I argue that this pattern indicates a marginal Mutual Exclusivity bias modulated by linguistic experience (Byers-Heinlein & Werker 2009, Rowe et al. 2015) and an emerging understanding of form-meaning mappings in different contexts.