Pearson B Z, Fernández S, Oller D K
University of Miami, Coral Gables, USA.
J Child Lang. 1995 Jun;22(2):345-68. doi: 10.1017/s030500090000982x.
This study tests the widely-cited claim from Volterra & Taeschner (1978), which is reinforced by Clark's PRINCIPLE OF CONTRAST (1987), that young simultaneous bilingual children reject cross-language synonyms in their earliest lexicons. The rejection of translation equivalents is taken by Volterra & Taeschner as support for the idea that the bilingual child possesses a single-language system which includes elements from both languages. We examine first the accuracy of the empirical claim and then its adequacy as support for the argument that bilingual children do not have independent lexical systems in each language. The vocabularies of 27 developing bilinguals were recorded at varying intervals between ages 0;8 and 2;6 using the MacArthur CDI, a standardized parent report form in English and Spanish. The two single-language vocabularies of each bilingual child were compared to determine how many pairs of translation equivalents (TEs) were reported for each child at different stages of development. TEs were observed for all children but one, with an average of 30% of all words coded in the two languages, both at early stages (in vocabularies of 2-12 words) and later (up to 500 words). Thus, Volterra & Taeschner's empirical claim was not upheld. Further, the number of TEs in the bilinguals' two lexicons was shown to be similar to the number of lexical items which co-occurred in the monolingual lexicons of two different children, as observed in 34 random pairings for between-child comparisons. It remains to be shown, therefore, that the bilinguals' lexicons are not composed of two independent systems at a very early age. Furthermore, the results appear to rule out the operation of a strong principle of contrast across languages in early bilingualism.
本研究检验了沃尔泰拉和泰施纳（1978年）广受引用的观点，克拉克的“对比原则”（1987年）对这一观点起到了强化作用，即早期同时学习双语的儿童在其最早的词汇表中会拒绝跨语言同义词。沃尔泰拉和泰施纳认为，拒绝翻译对等词支持了这样一种观点，即双语儿童拥有一个单一语言系统，其中包含两种语言的元素。我们首先考察这一实证观点的准确性，然后考察其作为双语儿童在每种语言中没有独立词汇系统这一论点的支撑的充分性。使用麦克阿瑟交流发展指标（MacArthur CDI），这是一种标准化的英文和西班牙文家长报告表，在27名正在学习双语的儿童0；8到2；6岁期间的不同时间点记录他们的词汇量。比较每个双语儿童的两种单语言词汇表，以确定在不同发展阶段每个儿童报告了多少对翻译对等词（TEs）。除了一名儿童外，在所有儿童中都观察到了翻译对等词，在早期阶段（词汇量为2 - 12个单词）和后期（词汇量达到500个单词），两种语言中编码的所有单词平均有30%是翻译对等词。因此，沃尔泰拉和泰施纳的实证观点没有得到支持。此外，双语儿童两种词汇表中的翻译对等词数量与两个不同儿童的单语言词汇表中共同出现的词汇项目数量相似，这是在34组用于儿童间比较的随机配对中观察到的。因此，仍有待证明双语儿童的词汇表在很早的年龄不是由两个独立的系统组成。此外，结果似乎排除了早期双语中跨语言的强烈对比原则的作用。
