Resumen de Early understanding of two words for the same thing: A CDI study of lexical comprehension in infant bilinguals
Annick de Houwer, Marc H. Bornstein, Sandrine De Coster
A basic question that arises with respect to early bilingual comprehension is whether, as in production, bilingual infants understand words from two languages that have the same meaning (translation equivalents). This study addresses this question using CDI-data from 31 children growing up bilingual in French and Dutch. Raters report that 13-month-old bilingual infants all understand translation equivalents; however, the extent to which children understand translation equivalents is marked by considerable inter-individual variability. This understanding is related to how many meanings children understand: the more advanced infants' comprehension skills are, the more meanings they know in two languages rather than just one.
