Vocabulary is poorer in the weaker language, with roughly one-third the word types of the stronger language¶
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? At comparable sample points, each child produced about one-third the number of word types in the Romance language compared to Swedish. → 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
Vocabulary comparison at selected sample points where children spoke relatively more in their weaker language (MLU 1.7-2.0, about 200 utterances, about 20 minutes of dialogue). The study found "each child produced in his Romance language about a third of the number of word types he produced in Swedish."
"each child used 100–150 word types in Swedish, whereas this was 46 for Lukas in Italian, 31 for Paul in French and 47 for L´eo in French. This means that each child produced in his Romance language about a third of the number of word types he produced in Swedish."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- The amount of input in each language is related to syntactic development and language dominance — related
- MLU differs by about one word between the stronger and weaker language throughout development — related
- Children with uneven bilingual development prefer the stronger language and mix sentence-internally mainly in weaker-language interactions — related
- Mixed utterances reflect the same amount of syntactic structure as monolingual utterances in the weaker language at the same recording — related
- Code-mixing decreases and ceases as the weaker language syntactic structure develops to CP level — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
vocabulary-poorer-in-weaker-language |
title |
Vocabulary is poorer in the weaker language, with roughly one-third the word types of the stronger language |
description |
Vocabulary is poorer in the weaker language, with roughly one-third the word types of the stronger language |
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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