Language Minority Children’s Sensitivity to the Semantic Relations Between Words

The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether Spanish-speaking language minority children develop conceptual knowledge (Cummins, 1981) that is common to their two languages alongside development of proficiency in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. Seventy-three first and second grade children completed two semantic priming tasks (i.e., a lexical decision task and a preferential looking paradigm) that were designed to examine children's sensitivity to the semantic relations between words within and across languages. It was hypothesized that within- and cross-language semantic priming effects would occur but that translation priming effects would not occur. Overall, results did not support hypotheses, as consistent semantic priming effects were not observed across the two tasks. However, limited evidence for semantic priming effects within English and from English to Spanish did emerge on the preferential looking paradigm. Substantial evidence for translation priming effects from Spanish-to-English was observed on the preferential looking paradigm. Children's Spanish vocabulary knowledge moderated translation priming effects on the lexical decision task. Although this pattern of results was not consistent with hypotheses, it was similar to the pattern of relations between bilingual individuals' L1 and L2 proposed by the revised hierarchical model (Kroll and Stewart, 1994). The results of this study indicated that Spanish-speaking language minority children rely on translation from their non-dominant to their dominant language to access meaning. Additionally, results provided limited evidence that information in the dominant and non-dominant language is activated simultaneously, indicating that children have conceptual knowledge that is common to both their L1 and L2.