Comprehending and defining homonyms in school-aged children from multicultural families

Abstract

Objectives: Studies on the vocabulary development of children from multicultural families in Korea have shown that they experience some degree of difficulties in vocabulary skills. Homonyms are words that have one phonological form but two or more distinct meanings, and are considered useful for assessing the vocabulary knowledge of school-aged children. In the present study, we investigated whether children from multicultural families differed from non-multicultural families in comprehending and defining homonyms. Methods: Twenty-four elementary school children in grades 2 and 3 participated in this study. Twelve children were from multicultural families (MCF) and the other twelve were from non-multicultural families (NMCF). The language development levels of all participants were within normal limits based on the results of a standardized vocabulary test and a sentence comprehension test. They performed a homonym comprehension task as well as a homonym definition task. In the comprehension task, the children were asked to decide on whether the homonym used in a pair of sentences had the same meaning. In the definition task, the children were asked to define a given homonym. Results: The children from MCF exhibited significantly lower performances than children from NMCF on both the homonym comprehension task and the definition task. Conclusion: Although the two groups were not significantly different with regard to their performances on the standardized vocabulary test, the children from MCF exhibited weaker vocabulary knowledge compared to the children from NMCF in their use of homonyms.