Comparative analysis of bilingual and monolingual students’ vocabulary: a theme and frequency-based study

Abstract

Abstract The study aims to compare the receptive and expressive vocabulary of Turkish-German bilinguals living in Germany with that of monolinguals (Turkish) residing in Turkey, focusing on factors such as gender, word themes, and frequency levels of the words in their first language. To this end, 66 Turkish-German bilingual students from Germany and 60 monolingual students aged 12–15 from Turkey were included in the study. To determine the participants’ receptive and expressive vocabulary, 32 words classified into 8 themes were selected from the first 4,000 words of the Turkish National Corpus. Receptive and expressive vocabulary tests were then administered for these words. The results of the study revealed that both monolinguals and bilinguals demonstrated higher success in receptive vocabulary compared to expressive vocabulary. It was observed that the expressive vocabulary of bilinguals varied according to the frequency levels of the words, with higher scores in high-frequency words ranked within the first 2,000 compared to medium-frequency words ranked between 2,001 and 4,000. It was found that bilingual female students were more successful in expressive vocabulary, while the gender variable did not create any differences in the monolingual student group. In thematic analysis, significant differences were found in favor of monolinguals in the categories of transportation, animals, and time, while no significant differences were observed between bilinguals and monolinguals in the themes of food, clothing, organs, materials, and family.