Bilinguals' knowledge of "home" and "school" words revisited : evidence from Polish-English bilinguals

Bilingual children’s total vocabulary in each of their languages is often smallerthan that of monolinguals. In their seminal study, Bialystok et al. (2010.‘Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual children.’Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13 (4): 525–531) divided children’svocabulary into ‘home’ and ‘school’ words and found no differences inbilinguals’ knowledge of ‘school’ words compared to monolinguals. InStudy 1, we asked 292 parents and teachers to categorize words into‘home’ or ‘school’ contexts, and in Study 2, we analyzed the vocabulary of220 Polish-English bilingual and monolingual (English and Polish) childrenaged 4.5–7. The results show that bilinguals knew fewer ‘home’ and ‘school’words than monolinguals in each language. However, bilinguals were likelyto be exposed to these words either at home or at school, whereasmonolinguals would hear them in both contexts. For a small subset ofEnglish words that bilinguals heard in both contexts, bilinguals showedsimilar performance to monolinguals. Our results provide evidence forexposure effects in vocabulary acquisition.