Lexikalische Fähigkeiten bilingualer Kinder mit Migrationshintergrund. Eine Studie zum Benennen von Nomen und Verben im Russischen und Deutschen.

The present study examined the productive lexical abilities of Russian-German bilin-gual children with an immigrant background, differentiated according to nouns and verbs. The first main objective was to explore the typical lexical developmental pat-terns in both languages of this population. This aim is motivated by the fact that there are no studies thus far concerning the qualitative lexical development of Russian-German bilingual children despite the fact that the Russian speaking population is one of the largest immigrant groups in Germany. The second main objective was to specify the influencing factors on the productive lexical abilities of bilingual chil-dren. In particular the influence of the semantic-conceptual complexity is considered by the differentiated observation of nouns and verbs. A further focus is on the role of the interaction of both lexicons of bilingual children. In a cross-sectional study the naming of nouns and verbs of 60 Russian-German bilingual children between 4;0-6;11 (years; month) has been examined and compared not just within the bilingual group, but also in relation to monolingual Russian and monolingual German chil-dren. The analyses are based on the number of items named correctly in single lan-guages, the conceptual knowledge of the bilingual children and error classification. Developmental patterns differ in both languages of the bilingual children: In German a growth in lexical abilities can be observed with increasing age. Six year old bilin-gual children have the same lexical abilities as five year old monolingual children. In Russian, from an age of four years on no growth in lexical abilities of the bilingual children could be observed. Already at this age it is evident that bilingual children are falling behind the lexical abilities of monolingual children. With increasing age the gap between both populations increased. Only children, who attend a bilingual Russian-German school program (this concerned half of the children in age group six), showed an increase in lexical abilities in Russian. The comparison between the languages of bilingual children revealed a dominance of German already in pre-school children, assessed by items named correctly and language mixing behaviour. The differentiated observation of the word categories showed that noun naming in bilingual children is more limited than verb naming. This finding suggests that the bilingual acquisition context does not intensify problems in the acquisition of seman-tic-conceptually complex words. This conclusion is strengthened by the observation, that bilingual children have more verb concepts than monolingual children. Further analyses revealed, that only noun naming in bilingual children is influenced more strongly by frequency than in monolingual children. Additionally, noun naming is more dependent on the amount of language use in the single languages of the bilin-gual children. To summarize, these findings indicate higher frequency sensitivity for nouns in bilingual acquisition context. This is attributed to differences of the distribu-tion of nouns and verbs in the input. A positive interaction in naming patterns be-tween the languages of the bilingual children could be proven, whereas it is dis-cussed, whether this can be interpreted as transfer on a conceptual level or as facilita-tion of lexical retrieval. Because the encountered interaction is independent from word category, it can be ruled out as the source for the word category specific differ-ences between bi- and monolingual children. From these findings follows a variety of practical implications for the assessment and promotion of lexical abilities in bilin-gual children. They are summarized in the conclusion.