Bilinguals’ knowledge of ‘home’ and ‘school’ words revisited: evidence from Polish-English bilinguals

Bilingual children’s total vocabulary in each of their languages is oftensmaller than that of monolinguals. In their seminal study, Bialystok et al.(2010. ‘Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingualchildren.’ Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13 (4): 525-531) dividedchildren’s vocabulary into ‘home’ and ‘school’ words and found nodifferences in bilinguals’ knowledge of ‘school’ words compared tomonolinguals. In Study 1, we asked 292 parents and teachers tocategorize words into ‘home’ or ‘school’ contexts, and in Study 2, weanalyzed the vocabulary of 220 Polish-English bilingual andmonolingual (English and Polish) children aged 4.5-7. The results showthat bilinguals knew fewer ‘home’ and ‘school’ words thanmonolinguals in each language. However, bilinguals were likely to beexposed to these words either at home or at school, whereasmonolinguals would hear them in both contexts. For a small subset ofEnglish words that bilinguals heard in both contexts, bilinguals showedsimilar performance to monolinguals. Our results provide evidence forexposure effects in vocabulary acquisition.