Internal and external influences on vocabulary development in preschool children

Abstract

Abstract Competency in society's lingua franca plays a major role in the emergence of social disparities within education. Therefore, the present longitudinal study investigates vocabulary development and its predictors in preschool years. We focus on whether internal (phonological working memory) and external variables (preschool and home learning environment) have different impacts depending on parental native language. The study considers 547 children from 97 German preschools. Children's vocabulary was assessed at the ages of 3, 4, and 5 years. Latent growth curve models show that non-native German language children are characterized by reduced vocabulary at first assessment and lower progress compared to monolingual peers. Phonological working memory has a strong impact on all children's initial vocabulary but also on vocabulary growth in those whose parents speak German as an additional language. The effects of preschool and home learning environment are comparatively smaller. Keywords: language developmentpreschool quality; home learning environmentlongitudinal studiesmigration Notes 1. Data collection was carried out within two subprojects of the larger interdisciplinary research group BiKS, funded by the German Research Foundation. We would like to thank all participating children, their parents, and their preschool teachers, as well as all students engaged in data collection for their most active cooperation. 2. Note that these are all children included in the BiKS-3-10 study. In the other BiKS paper in this issue (Anders, Grosse, Rossbach, Ebert, & Weinert, this issue), fewer children were included (99.4% of the original study) due to missing data in relevant variables. 3. Note that the descriptives for preschool measures are slightly different from those reported in the other BiKS paper (Anders et al., this issue). This is due to the fact that for the present analyses only preschool measures of the first two measurement points are considered, because only these were assessed before the last assessment of the developmental variable. 4. Since the number of children whose parents have another mother tongue than German is relatively small, the analyses refer to all children with another language background than German (one or two parents) and contrast them against monolingual German children. 5. Lower class sizes and higher child–staff ratio in preschools with comparatively more children with migration background are due to German law.