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by cryptotype 3856 days ago
Regarding fluency, bilinguals and monolinguals often have often have similar total vocabulary sizes, but bilinguals tend to have a significantly smaller vocabulary in each language.[1, 2] In other words, vocabulary size(L1, monolingual) ~= size(L1 + L2, bilingual), and size(L1, monolingual) < size(L1, bilingual).

1. Portocarrero et al. (2007). http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0887617707...

2. Gatt et al. (2015). http://ijb.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/03/13/136700691557...