MLU differs by about one word between the stronger and weaker language throughout development¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · associationalr1·q3
Currency · newest study 2004 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · overdue for a recheck since 2009: baselines and conditions change
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q3 i? All three children's MLUs differed greatly between the two languages, by about one entire word throughout their development. → Bernardini 2004
Evidence¶
Bernardini 2004¶
Bernardini, P., & Schlyter, S. (2004). Growing syntactic structure and code-mixing in the weaker language: The Ivy Hypothesis. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7(1), 49-69. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728904001270
q3 · i? · associational · r1
MLU was counted in words for pure utterances and for language-specific parts of mixed utterances, separately for each interaction context. The authors report "All three children' s MLUs differed greatly between the two languages, by about one entire word throughout their development," noting this exceeds the 0.2-0.9 difference reported in prior studies.
"All three children' s MLUs differed greatly between the two languages, by about one entire word throughout their development (Figure 5)."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- The amount of input in each language is related to syntactic development and language dominance — related
- Vocabulary is poorer in the weaker language, with roughly one-third the word types of the stronger language — related
- Children with uneven bilingual development prefer the stronger language and mix sentence-internally mainly in weaker-language interactions — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
mlu-difference-one-word-between-languages |
title |
MLU differs by about one word between the stronger and weaker language throughout development |
description |
MLU differs by about one word between the stronger and weaker language throughout development |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
moderate |
newest_evidence |
2004 |
recheck_by |
2009 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-17 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — bernardini-2004 |
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