Lexical development in monolingual, bilingual and trilingual Lebanese preschool children: the effect of endogenous and exogenous factors

In preschool monolingual or plurilingual children, significant quantitative variations within their vocabulary have been demonstrated (Fenson et al., 1993; Coté et al., 2022). These variations have been linked to various endogenous (such as gender, cognitive development) and exogenous (such as language status, socioeconomic status, language exposure...) factors in the child, which carry different weight depending on age and whether the language aspect is expressive or receptive. For instance, gender has a more pronounced effect on productive vocabulary size in children under the age of 3 (Kern & Gayraud, 2010). Our study aims to elucidate the receptive and expressive lexical development in two groups of Lebanese children aged between 8 and 16 months (n=184), and 16 and 30 months (n=181). Parents were asked to complete two questionnaires: the PaBiQ-IT (Parental Bilingual Questionnaire-Infants and Toddlers), which provides some information about language exposure, and the IDC-L 8-16 and 16-30, which are Lebanese trilingual adaptations of the respective M-CDI versions (Fenson et al., 1993) developed by Messarra et al. This trilingual questionnaire assesses Lebanese Arabic, French and English with a set of words that are translation equivalents. The scores used for comprehension and production are the total vocabulary score and the conceptual score. With these measures, we examined the influence of gender, socioeconomic status (SES), childcare arrangement, and language status (monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual) on the size of receptive and expressive vocabulary. A difference for gender and for language status was found for the 8-16 group but not for the 16-30 group. Girls and multilingual children had larger vocabularies than their peers. No difference was found for SES. An effect of childcare arrangement was found for production. Lebanese children in daycare have a larger productive vocabulary than their peers not in daycare. However, for the 8-16 group, age may be a confounding factor.
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