Jenny Yichun Kuo, National Chiayi University
Many countries enjoy long histories of bi- or multilingualism; while many traditionally monolingual countries like the US are experiencing increasing bilingualism due to immigration (August & Shanahan, 2006). However, most of the lexical assessments were developed for monolinguals, which have been shown to be inaccurate to assess bilinguals.
The most common measure of preschoolers’ vocabulary size is parent report such as MB CD-I and MB CDI-II (Fenson et al, 1993a, 1993b), available in 61 languages (Dale & Penfold, 2011). However, it is an indirect measure and not objective (Caselli, et, al, 1995). The other format is picture vocabulary test with Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Dunn & Dunn, 1981) used most widely, translated into Chinese (Lu & Liu, 1998). However, the translated version has underestimated the vocabulary size of Mandarin speakers (Kuo & Yu, 2014). The current Mandarin vocabulary tests were either translated from English (i.e. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Lu & Liu, 1998), or followed different procedures from tests in other languages (i.e., Chinese Vocabulary Test (Kuo & Yu, 2014) which cannot be used to test bilinguals or for cross-linguistic study. In this study, I constructed an international and standardized picture vocabulary comprehension task in Mandarin for preschoolers. The design of the task followed the procedures of cross-linguistic lexical tasks in 32 languages (Haman, Łuniewska, and Pomiechowska, 2015) and computerized on a tablet.
First twenty Mandarin-speaking adults named 300 pictures and we selected those with high agreement as candidate words for the lexical task. Then, another 43 Mandarin-speaking adults participated in the rating of age of acquisition of those words. Moreover, the phonological and morphological complexity was calculated. The noun and verb task each consists of two training trails and 30 trails with comparable level of difficulty in terms of age of acquisition and complexity. The instructions were recorded in Mandarin with automatic scoring and reaction time measure. The expert validity was attained by consulting a speech pathologist and an early childhood educator. The task was given to 500 Mandarin-speaking children aged 2-6 in Taiwan, 100 for each age group. The scores increase with age. The concurrent validity was established with Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test with correlation 77.
This Mandarin picture vocabulary measure could provide an assessment tool for preschooler’s vocabulary development in Mandarin monolinguals or bilinguals for diagnosis of language delay or language disorder. It will also make a valuable tool for cross-linguistic research in language acquisition.