Het Tweetalige Lexicon: Woordassociaties Van Turkse Kinderen in het Turks en het Nederlands

The present paper reports on a study of the continued word associa-tions to eight stimulus words in Dutch and Turkish by Turkish migrant children living in the Netherlands. For three out of the eight stimulus words the meanings in the two languages were not complete-ly overlapping. Two written association tasks were administered with an interval of five months. Seventeen Turkish children (about 12 years old) participated in the study. It was found that:- Interlingual responses hardly occurred (only a few instances of Dutch or Dutch-like words in the Turkish task).- The children gave more responses (number of tokens) in the Tur-kish than in the Dutch version (difference not significant at 5% level; significant at 10% level), suggesting a larger vocabulary in Turkish.- The diversity of the responses was slightly higher in the Dutch version of the task than in the Turkish version.- The level of linguistic-cognitive development as indicated by the proportion of paradigmatic and categorical responses was about the same in the two languages with a slight bias in favour of Turkish.- The number of equivalent responses in the two tasks was 36,8%.- For five of the eight stimulus words ('happiness' and 'city') the responses in the two languages differed strikingly. Probably the response behaviour was influenced by social-cultural factors related to each language.- For one of the three semantically not completely overlapping words (Dutch: dochter, and Turkish kiz, 'daughter'/'girr) the Dutch res-ponses (frequent use of kinship terms) differed strongly from the Turkish responses (few kinship term)