Verbal Fluency tasks to assess lexical proficiency in bilingual children

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Verbal Fluency tasks to assess lexical
proficiency in bilingual children

• Lisa Calligaro1
• Heila Jordaan1
• Peter Fridjhon2
• University of the Witwatersrand
• 1Discipline of Speech Pathology and Audiology
• 2Discipline of Statistics and Actuarial Science

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The bilingual test taker cannot perform like a
monolingual, and the monolingual test cannot
measure the other language. Lavandera
(19786, in Valdés and Figueroa, 1994)
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Aims of the study

• To assess bilingual lexical proficiency in South
  African bilinguals
• To compare bilingual and monolingual subject
  responses on VF tasks with
• a) total number of words generated
• b) strategies utilised to generate words
• c) switches from one language to another.
• To determine whether the bilingual mode increases
  the total number of words generated.
• To investigate the superiority of bilinguals on
  metalinguistic tasks

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Table 1. Subject selection according to gender,
school and language. (Subject age 12 years)
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Table 5. Phonemic strategies used

• Consonant Vowel syllables
• An-
• Sn-
• Fl-
• Sl-
• For-
• Sw-
• St-
• Afrikaans words are written in italics

• Examples of word strings
• ant, antelope, animal
• snake, snail, snap
• fluffy, flower, flung
• slop, slink, slide
• forever, forecast, for
• sweep, swart, swan
• stop, staan, stand

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Table 6. Means and standard deviations of code
switches on VF tasks
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Table 7. Pearsons correlation co-efficients for
number of code-switches on phonemic and semantic
VF tasks in the bilingual mode.