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Semantics In Bilingual Children Essay

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ASSESSING LEXICAL DEPTH AND BREATH IN BILINGUAL CHILDREN AGED BETWEEN
5-10YEARS OF AGE
INTRODUCTION
Communication is the process of encoding, transmitting and decoding the intended messages wherein individuals exchange information and ideas, needs and desires (Owens, 1996). According to American Speech Language Hearing Association (1982) language is a complex and dynamic system of conventional symbols that is used in various modes for thought and communication. Language which is a socially shared code is a conventional system for representing concepts through the use of arbitrary symbols and rule governed combinations of the symbols (Owens, 2000). It is a combination of several rule systems comprising of phonology, semantics, syntax, morphology, and pragmatic aspects which is crucial for language development.
Semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of discourse (termed texts or narratives). The study of semantics is also closely linked to the subjects of representation, reference and denotation and it encompasses the relationship between words and their semantic roles. During the semantic development in children, infants begin using identifiable words whose meaning is not known. During the infants gradual semantic network …show more content…

Various research work in this field yield a bilingual advantage hypothesis which proposes a relationship between bilingualism and cognitive development. According to this, early awareness of different words and that different words can label the same concept, may drive early development of semantic relations in the lexicon of the bilingual child (Cummins, 2001; Vygotsky, 1962). Thereby, bilingual children possess a more developed semantic network than monolingual

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