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Abstract

Spanish/English bilingual children's comprehension of 26 relational concepts in their two languages was studied to separate some cognitive and linguistic factors in relational concept acquisition and to establish some pertinent operat ing principles for language acquisition. The following oper ating principles were proposed and supported by the results: (a) concepts with positive polarity are acquired prior to concepts with negative polarity; (b) the rate of acquisition for the terms in the two languages is a function of linguistic complexity; (c) terms are acquired in identical order in the two languages when cognitive complexity is equivalent; (d) terms are acquired from the most general to the most specific; (e) where two concepts have equivalent cognitive complexity, the terms with the higher frequency of usage are acquired before terms with the lower frequency of usage; and (f) terms which are morphologically related are acquired before terms which are lexically distinct. A methodology which takes advantage of the two linguistic systems of bi lingual children provides more information on the separa tion of cognitive and linguistic factors underlying language acquisition.

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Comprehension of Relational Concepts: Use of Bilingual Children to Separate Cognitive and Linguistic Factors

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