Lexical divergence in monolingual and bilingual lexical development

The bilingual lexicon is not fully monolingual-like in either language. Research on the adult bilingual lexicon demonstrates convergence of naming patterns for common household objects to a partially merged pattern for a bilingual’s two languages. We present work concerning the developmental trajectory of naming of common household objects in Dutch-French bilingual and monolingual children. To this end we collected naming data for a stimulus set of nearly 200 household containers of monolingual French-speaking, monolingual Dutch-speaking and French-Dutch simultaneous bilinguals of 6 different age groups (5, 8, 10, 12, 14 year olds and adults) totaling to a number of 499 participants. Multidimensional scaling analysis on a group level using averaged naming patterns per age group suggest that convergence is present at all ages since the bilingual naming pattern is consistently situated in between both monolingual patterns. Apart from a language related dimension our representation also shows a clear age related dimension representing the developmental trajectory. On the individual level, analysis taking into account individual naming patterns and pairwise between-subject correlations shows that monolingual naming patterns in two different languages show a remarkable correspondence at younger ages (possibly driven by common strategies such as overextension of large categories). Over the course of development the naming patterns of monolingual children demonstrate increasing divergence as they learn the language specificities of their mother tongue. Bilingual children start off with a fully converged naming pattern which they maintain up till age 10 and start learning language specific idiosyncrasies from age 12 onwards hereby diverging their naming patterns, but never to the extent of monolinguals. These results seem to contradict the theories of both stable and gradual convergence proposed by Storms and colleagues. Based on these results we propose an alternative hypothesis for bilingual lexical development: the gradual divergence hypothesis.status: publishe