Testing the Lexical Competence of German in Slovak-German and German(Austrian)-Czech/Slovak Adolescent Bilinguals

The paper builds on our previous work in the field of bilingual education and/ or the process of natural bilingualisation of Slovak-German bilinguals in Slovak educational diasporas (educational islands) in Austria. Starting point of psycholinguistic testing based on classic American Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test ( PPVT -III in its revised and German version) presented in this paper is the thesis of initial lagging behind of linguistic (lexical, grammatical) competence level of language L2 of bilingual children from preschool age in relation to various sociolinguistic variables, which, however, with age may, under certain favourable conditions nearly equal competence of monolinguals and in the area of reception of language even exceed it. For testing the reception levels of German mental lexicon we used two approximately equally large groups of respondents in a bilingual secondary grammar school in Bratislava and Vienna. The hypothesis of our research was that bilingual Austrian-Czech/Slovak bilinguals from Austria would achieve significantly better results than the Slovak-German bilinguals from Slovakia. The test results, however, surprisingly disproved our hypothesis and want to contribute to the debate on setting minimum standards of language competence of bilinguals as well as on optimisation of conditions of bilingual or monolingual education of not only Slovaks abroad.