CONCEPTUAL VOCABULARY: what is it and why is it important?

Conceptual vocabulary for bilingual children is to the collection of words and terms that are essential for understanding and expressing ideas, concepts, and relationships in two languages.

One of the questions that the majority of parents of bilingual kids ask is why their kids have a poorer vocabulary in one language if compared with cousins, peers, or other kids who speak only one language, also known with the term monolingual kids. This comparison leads the parents to think that their children can have a speech delay and it might be a bad consequence of bilingualism. 

It’s true that if we compare a child who speaks only one language to another one who speaks two or more, the second one might appear with a delay in his vocabulary. The question that I want to ask you is: 

Are we sure to measure the bilingual kid appropriately? 

The answer is no! If you measure bilinguals using a monolingual measure, you are more likely to find false evidence of delay. 

Because of this in bilingual kids, we have to calculate what is known as conceptual vocabulary. To discover it you don’t have to do nothing more than a simple addition and subtraction. I apologise to those who are not big fans of maths but I promise it’s very easy to understand! 

Basically for calculating the conceptual vocabulary we need to do an addition between the amount of words that the kid knows in each language and subtract from the total words the ones that he can say in both languages. 

Let’s follow the example below for better understanding.

Sophie is a toddler who is a simultaneous bilingual because she has been exposed to English and Spanish from birth. She knows 50 words in English and 50 words in Spanish; we are now assuming that 10 of them she knows in both languages (e.g. she knows how to say dog, cat, banana and other seven words in Spanish and English). 

The parents are a little bit worried because her monolingual cousin, who is the same age as Sophie, knows 90 words, so she thinks that their daughter might present a language delay. 

Are we sure about that? To check if it’s right we have to count her conceptual vocabulary: 

50 (English words) + 50 (Spanish words) = 100 overall words

100 (overall words) – 10 (common words) = 90 words

Her conceptual vocabulary is about 90 words!

Sophie has no language delay and her vocabulary is the same as her cousin. The difference is that her cousin, as said before, is monolingual meanwhile Sophie is bilingual. We couldn’t make a bigger mistake than do a comparison between the two girls without taking into consideration the conceptual vocabulary! 

Bibliography:

1. Byers-Heinlein, K., & Lew-Williams, C. (2013). Bilingualism in the Early Years: What the Science Says. LEARNing landscapes, 7(1), 95–112.