Word definitions by Spanish and English bilingual children from low-income families

This study investigates the ability of Spanish-English bilingual children from low-income families to give word definitions in their L1 (Spanish) and L2 (English) as well as the relationship between their word definition ability and L2 proficiency. Eleven seventh grade children were involved in the study. Three questions were proposed. First, to what extent is L1 definition performance and L2 proficiency predictive of bilingual children's performance on an L2 word definition task? Second, is there a significant interaction between L1 word definition ability and second language proficiency? Finally, is there a qualitative difference in relation to the syntactic and semantic aspects of the participants' word definitions in the first language and the second language? Results indicated that Spanish definition performance did predict how children would perform on the English definition task that the overall effect of English proficiency alone was insignificant, and was thus ultimately excluded, from the rest of the study. Results also demonstrated that all but one subject gave a greater number of definitions considered high quality syntactically as opposed to semantically.