Determining Lexical Competence to Measure Language Progress in Urban Bi and Multilingual Preschool Children

This study examines the lexical growth of pre-schoolers in bilingual/multilingual Pakistani community. These children are immersed in English (L2/L3) at playschool while being exposed to their mother tongue (L1) and Urdu (L1/L2) at home. The primary goal of this cross-sectional quantitative study is to ascertain the lexical advancement among children across four age groups, evaluating them on conceptual criteria, and employing a tool specifically developed for assessing lexicon. A simple random selection of 100 typical bilingual and multilingual children were recruited from mainstream playschools. Each child was screened with a Lexical Skills Screener designed for bilingual/multilingual individuals, with 255 culturally relevant images that assessed their morphological and semantic abilities. The participants identified pictures using English and Urdu, rather than their native language. An observable increase in lexical competence was noted across age groups. Specifically, children aged 2 to 2.11 years identified 40.7% of the pictures, those aged 3 to 3.11 years identified 49.02%, and those aged 4 to 4.11 years identified 62.75 % of the total images. In early childhood, children effortlessly pick up multiple languages. Among bilingual/multilingual children across the three age groups, vocabulary growth across each language is uneven.