SynthesisPsychonomic bulletin & review2023
Does bilingualism come with linguistic costs? A meta-analytic review of the bilingual lexical deficit.
Synthesis in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sprinting in two languages: Picture naming performance of older Spanish-English bilinguals on the Multilingual Naming Test Sprint 2.0.Neuropsychology · 2024Article
- Modeling lexical abilities of heritage language and L2 speakers of Hebrew and English in Israel and the United States: a network approach.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- A Classification Bias and an Exclusion Bias Jointly Overinflated the Estimation of Publication Biases in Bilingualism Research.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Redefining the norms: an interdisciplinary perspective on language testing in multilinguals with acquired and progressive neurogenic disorders.Alzheimer's & dementia (Amsterdam, Netherlands)Review
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
A series of recent studies have shown that the once-assumed cognitive advantage of bilingualism finds little support in the evidence available to date. Surprisingly, however, the view that bilingualism incurs linguistic costs (the so-called lexical deficit) has not yet been subjected to the same degree of scrutiny, despite its centrality for our understanding of the human capacity for language. The current study implemented a comprehensive meta-analysis to address this gap. By analyzing 478 effect sizes from 130 studies on expressive vocabulary, we found that observed lexical deficits could not be attributed to bilingualism: Simultaneous bilinguals (who acquired both languages from birth) did not exhibit any lexical deficit, nor did sequential bilinguals (who acquired one language from birth and a second language after that) when tested in their mother tongue. Instead, systematic evidence for a lexical deficit was found among sequential bilinguals when tested in their second language, and more so for late than for early second language learners. This result suggests that a lexical deficit may be a phenomenon of second language acquisition rather than bilingualism per se.
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Registered trials
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