Differences in phonological awareness performance. Are there positive or negative effects of bilingual experience?
Publication year
2021Number of pages
34 p.
Source
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 11, 3, (2021), pp. 418-451ISSN
Annotation
29 oktober 2019
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor

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Organization
Taalwetenschap
Engelse Taalkunde
Toegepaste Taalwetenschap
SW OZ DCC PL
Journal title
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Volume
vol. 11
Issue
iss. 3
Languages used
English (eng)
Page start
p. 418
Page end
p. 451
Subject
Cognitive and developmental aspects of Multilingualism; Language & Communication; Language Variation in 4D; Psycholinguistics; Speech Production and ComprehensionAbstract
Children who have knowledge of two languages may show better phonological awareness than their monolingual peers (e.g. Bruck & Genesee, 1995). It remains unclear how much bilingual experience is needed for such advantages to appear, and whether differences in language or cognitive skills alter the relation between bilingualism and phonological awareness. These questions were investigated in this cross-sectional study. Participants (n = 294; 4-7 year-olds, in the first three grades of primary school) were Dutch-speaking pupils attending mainstream monolingual Dutch primary schools or early-English schools providing English lessons from grade 1, and simultaneous Dutch-English bilinguals. We investigated phonological awareness (rhyming, phoneme blending, onset phoneme identification, and phoneme deletion) and its relation to age, Dutch vocabulary, English vocabulary, working memory and short-term memory, and the balance between Dutch and English vocabulary. Small significant (α = .05) effects of bilingualism were found on onset phoneme identification and phoneme deletion, but post-hoc comparisons revealed no robust pairwise differences between the groups. Furthermore, effects of bilingualism sometimes disappeared when differences in language or memory skills were taken into account. Learning two languages simultaneously is not beneficial to - and importantly, also not detrimental to - phonological awareness.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [203793]
- Faculty of Arts [23941]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [27292]
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