Verarbeitung von Wortformen bei monolingualen und bilingualen Kindern

The acquisition and processing of words are fundamental for language acquisition and therefore essential for children's communicative abilities and educational success. The quality and granularity of stored phonological word forms and their retrieval play a crucial role in order to store, process and activate words. According to psycholinguistic models, these processes are attributed to the phonological input and output lexicon. Within this dissertation, the emphasis lies on the diversity of lexical abilities in monolingual and bilingual primary school children with a focus on the word form level. Against the background of a psycholinguistic model, individual strengths and weaknesses in lexical processing can be identified. This is of particular importance in the context of clinical diagnostic processes as a basis for adequate speech and language therapy. The sample consisted of 203 children aged 6 to 9 years. Many of them (n = 164) were monolingual speakers of German. A smaller group (n = 39) of bilingual children spoke German and another language. In addition to traditional vocabulary tests (word-picture matching and picture naming), an auditory lexical decision task and a rapid naming task were developed and used to specifically test word form processing in the phonological input and output lexicon. Further tasks, examining pre- and postlexical components of word processing, supplemented the test battery. The collected data were evaluated and analyzed with regard to different questions. One focus was on systematization of the diverse lexical abilities of children. The results showed five clusters with different lexical profiles in the group of monolingual and very similar in the group of bilingual children. This was a first indication with regard to the second focus of this work, a comparison between monolingual and bilingual primary school children. This comparison revealed resembling abilities in word form processing regardless of the type of language acquisition (monolingual or bilingual), presumably with an initial weakness of bilingual children at the beginning of the primary school. Finally, the auditory lexical decision task and the rapid naming task were evaluated and turned out to be appropriate to investigate word form processing on the receptive and expressive level and to reveal underlying functional deficits of lexical disorders in primary school children. Employing the tasks in clinical assessment seem to be useful with regard to individual and effective interventions in speech and language therapy.