著者

芝 祐順 大浜 幾久子 野口 裕之

出版者

東京大学

雑誌

東京大学教育学部紀要 (ISSN:04957849)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.20, pp.111-128, 1981-02-20

被引用文献数

1

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Vocabulary of Japanese children who live in a bilingual or trilingual environment was measured and analyzed in relation to results of a questionnire. A semi-adaptive test of Japanese vocabulary was administered to about four hundred Japanese children from the first to the ninth graders in Canada, U.S.A., Australia ,and Switzerland. Testing procedure consists of two steps; a short form of the stratified adaptive test for preliminary measurements and a conventional test for accurate measurement. Each child was tested individually, at first, by the short form, and then was tested again by one of the ten forms of the conventional tests with appropriate difficulty. The distributions of scores of vocabulary were lower and wider in their ranges, in general, comparing to the distributions of the scores obtained from standard group of children in Tokyo. Children who have been abroad for long years show more retardation in their vocabulary development. This tendency was especially significant among children from the first to the forth graders. It was suggested that the critical period for the acquistion of maternal language might exist by the age of ten years old. From methodological point of view, the efficiency of the testing procedure was evaluated. Test information curves obtained from the results of the stratified adaptive test show, in most cases, that the adaptive test works fairly well as the preliminary measurement in choosing an appropriate form of conventional test.