Measuring Growth in Bilingual and Monolingual Children’s English Productive Vocabulary Development: The Utility of Combining Parent and Teacher Report
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This longitudinal study examined growth in the English productive vocabularies of bilingual and monolingual children between ages 24 and 36 months and explored the utility and validity of supplementing parent reports with teacher reports to improve the estimation of children’s vocabulary. Low-income, English-speaking and English/Spanish-speaking parents and Early Head Start and Head Start program teachers completed the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory, Words and Sentences for 85 children. Results indicate faster growth rates for monolingual than for bilingual children and larger vocabularies for bilingual children who spoke mostly English than mostly Spanish at home. Parent–teacher composite reports, like parent reports, significantly related to children’s directly assessed productive vocabulary at ages 30 and 36 months, but parent reports fit the model better. Implications for vocabulary assessment are discussed.
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The Distant bilingual group (Polish-Dutch, Turkish-Dutch, Moroccan-Dutch) scored, on average, within the normal range of monolingual variation.
“The Distant bilingual group (Polish-Dutch, Turkish-Dutch, Moroccan-Dutch) scored, on average, within the normal range of monolingual variation, similar to what has been found in other studies that compared the scores of bilinguals to monolingual norms (Hammer et al., 2014;Pearson et al., 1993;Vagh et al., 2009).”
From Cross-language distance influences receptive vocabulary outcomes of bilingual children (2020) · cites this paper as Vagh et al., 2009
The paper compares Spanish–English bilingual children with monolingual children, and Appendix B reports bilingual mean standardized vocabulary scores of 89.9 and 85.4. It does not study the Polish–Dutch, Turkish–Dutch, or Moroccan–Dutch group, and it does not establish that bilingual averages generally fall within normal monolingual variation. Its Discussion instead describes an English-vocabulary lag in its sample. Page numbers were not available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.82)
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Hoff, E. (2013) · Developmental Psychology · doi:10.1037/a0027238 · Cited by 976 · see citing works
The language and literacy development of young dual language learners: A critical review
Hammer, C. S., Hoff, E., Uchikoshi, Y., Gillanders, C., Castro, D. C., & Sandilos, L. E. (2014) · Early Childhood Research Quarterly · doi:10.1016/j.ecresq.2014.05.008 · Cited by 410 · see citing works
BEDORE, L. M., PEÑA, E. D., SUMMERS, C. L., BOERGER, K. M., RESENDIZ, M. D., GREENE, K., BOHMAN, T. M., & GILLAM, R. B. (2012) · Bilingualism: Language and Cognition · doi:10.1017/s1366728912000090 · Cited by 365 · see citing works
Stolarova, M., Wolf, C., Rinker, T., & Brielmann, A. (2014) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00509 · Cited by 93 · see citing works
Cross-language distance influences receptive vocabulary outcomes of bilingual children
Blom, E., Boerma, T., Bosma, E., Cornips, L., van den Heuij, K., & Timmermeister, M. (2020) · First Language · doi:10.1177/0142723719892794 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
- Authors
- Vagh, S. B., Pan, B. A., & Mancilla-Martinez, J.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Harvard Graduate School of Education
- Corresponding author
- Vagh, Shaher Banu
- ORCID
- Vagh, Shaher Banu
- Venue
- Child Development
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2009-09-01
- Volume
- 80
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1545-1563
- ISSN
- 0009-3920 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-8624
- OpenAlex
- W2111615025
- Cited by
- 152
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 6 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 11 · 2020: 38 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 16 · 2013: 12 · 2012: 7
- FWCI
- 8.73
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Child Development (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Harvard Graduate School of Education
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Second Language Acquisition and Learning
- Keywords
- vocabulary development, bilingual children, monolingual children, Spanish-English bilingualism, parent report, teacher reports, MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, Early Head Start, Head Start, low-income children, home language use
- MeSH terms
- Child, Preschool, Faculty, Female, Humans, Infant, Language Development, Language Tests, Longitudinal Studies, Male, Parents, Socioeconomic Factors, Verbal Behavior, Vocabulary, Reproducibility of Results, Multilingualism
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