The effects of bilingual status on lexical comprehension and production in Maltese five-year-old children: A LITMUS-CLT study

Polish norms for a set of colored drawings of 168 objects and 146 actions with predictors of naming performance

In this study, we present the first database of pictures and their corresponding psycholinguistic norms for Polish: the CLT database. In this norming study, we used the pictures from Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT): a set of colored drawings of 168 object and 146 actions. The CLT pictures were carefully created to provide a valid tool for multicultural comparisons. The pictures are accompanied by norms for Naming latencies, Name agreement, Goodness of depiction, Image agreement, Concept familiarity, Age of acquisition, Imageability, Lexical frequency, and Word complexity. We also report analyses of predictors of Naming latencies for pictures of objects and actions. Our results show that Name agreement, Concept familiarity, and Lexical frequency are significant predictors of Naming latencies for pictures of both objects and actions. Additionally, Age of acquisition significantly predicts Naming latencies of pictures of objects. The CLT database is freely available at osf.io/gp9qd. The full set of CLT pictures, including additional variants of pictures, is available on request at osf.io/y2cwr.

Testing the validity of the Cross-Linguistic Lexical Task as a measure of language proficiency in bilingual children

The Cross-linguistic Lexical Task (CLT; Haman, Łuniewska & Pomiechowska, 2015) is a vocabulary task designed to enable cross-linguistic comparisons both across and within (bilingual) children. In this paper we assessed the validity of the CLT as a measure of language proficiency in bilingual children, by determining the extent to which (i) age-matched, monolingual Spanish-speaking and Dutch-speaking children obtained similar scores, (ii) the CLT correlated with other measures of language proficiency in monolingual and bilingual children, and (iii) whether the factors underlying the CLT's construction, i.e., target words' estimated Age of Acquisition and Complexity Index, were predictive of children's scores. Our results showed that, while the CLT correlated with other measures and is therefore a valid means of tapping into language proficiency, caution is required when using it to compare children's language proficiency cross-linguistically, as scores for Dutch-speaking and Spanish-speaking monolinguals sometimes differed.

Noun and verb knowledge in monolingual preschool children across 17 languages: Data from Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT)

This article investigates the cross-linguistic comparability of the newly developed lexical assessment tool Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (LITMUS-CLT). LITMUS-CLT is a part the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery (Armon-Lotem, de Jong & Meir, 2015). Here we analyse results on receptive and expressive word knowledge tasks for nouns and verbs across 17 languages from eight different language families: Baltic (Lithuanian), Bantu (isiXhosa), Finnic (Finnish), Germanic (Afrikaans, British English, South African English, German, Luxembourgish, Norwegian, Swedish), Romance (Catalan, Italian), Semitic (Hebrew), Slavic (Polish, Serbian, Slovak) and Turkic (Turkish). The participants were 639 monolingual children aged 3;0-6;11 living in 15 different countries. Differences in vocabulary size were small between 16 of the languages; but isiXhosa-speaking children knew significantly fewer words than speakers of the other languages. There was a robust effect of word class: accuracy was higher for nouns than verbs. Furthermore, comprehension was more advanced than production. Results are discussed in the context of cross-linguistic comparisons of lexical development in monolingual and bilingual populations.