Contribution de l'apprentissage précoce d'une deuxième langue au développement de la conscience linguistique et à l'apprentissage de la lecture

The present study aims to validate the effects of second language learning on children's linguistic awareness. More particularly, we examine whether bilingual background improves the ability to manipulate morpho‐syntactic structure. We postulate that children who received a precocious learning of two languages (French‐German) may develop enhanced awareness and control of syntactic structure since they need an appropriate syntactic repertoire in each language. In return, these children will gain access to the written language with more ease. Our results show an advantage for the children who attended bilingual classes since kindergarten: they were better at grammatical judgement and correction tasks and word recognition.     

Language-specific Knowledge and Short-term Memory in Bilingual and Non-bilingual Children

The sensitivity of children's phonological short-term memory performance to languagespecific knowledge was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, monolingual English children, English-French bilingual children, and English children who were learning French as a second language were compared on measures of phonological short-term memory and vocabulary in the two languages. The children's short-term memory performance in each language mirrored their familiarity with English and French, with greater vocabulary knowledge being associated with higher levels of recall of both words and nonwords in that language. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, in which two groups of children with good knowledge of English and French were examined: native bilingual children who had comparable knowledge of the two languages and non-native bilingual children who had a greater knowledge of their native than second language. The findings indicate that phonological short-term memory is not a language-independent system but, rather, functions in a highly language-specific way.     

Concurrent language and motor performance in bilinguals: a test of the age of acquisition hypothesis.

The objective of the present study was to test the hypothesis that the age at which a second language is acquired influences the pattern of cerebral lateralization associated with that language. Subjects who differed in terms of the age at which they had acquired their second language (English or French) were tested on a concurrent task paradigm involving motor and language performance. Hemispheric processing was inferred from the pattern of lateralized and generalized interference between the tasks. No support was found for the age-of-acquisition hypothesis. Instead, the data indicated a language-specific effect. Regardless of age of acquisition and of whether the first language was English or French, bilingual subjects showed lateralized interference effects consistent with left-hemisphere processing when reading in English and translating from French into English, but no lateralized interference when reading in French and translating from English into French. Whether this effect reflects characteristics of the two languages or the influence of social factors in subject-experimenter interaction is considered.     

The effect of childhood bilingualism on episodic and semantic memory tasks

Kormi-Nouri, Moniri and Nilsson (2003) demonstrated that Swedish-Persian bilingual children recalled at a higher level than Swedish monolingual children, when they were tested using Swedish materials. The present study was designed to examine the bilingual advantage of children who use different languages in their everyday life but have the same cultural background and live in their communities in the same way as monolingual children. In four experiments, 488 monolingual and bilingual children were compared with regard to episodic and semantic memory tasks. In experiments 1 and 2 there were 144 boys and 144 girls in three school groups (aged 9-10 years, 13-14 years and 16-17 years) and in three language groups (Persian monolingual, Turkish-Persian bilingual, and Kurdish-Persian bilingual). In experiments 3 and 4, there were 200 male students in two school groups (aged 9-10 years and 16-17 years) and in two language groups (Persian monolingual and Turkish-Persian bilingual). In the episodic memory task, children learned sentences (experiments 1-3) and words (Experiment 4). Letter and category fluency tests were used as measures of semantic memory. To change cognitive demands in memory tasks, in Experiment 1, the integration of nouns and verbs within sentences was manipulated by the level of association between verb and noun in each sentence. At retrieval, a recognition test was used. In experiments 2 and 3, the organization between sentences was manipulated at encoding in Experiment 2 and at both encoding and retrieval in Experiment 3 through the use of categories among the objects. At retrieval, free recall or cued recall tests were employed. In Experiment 4, the bilingual children were tested with regard to both their first and their second language. In all four experiments, a positive effect of bilingualism was found on episodic and semantic memory tasks; the effect was more pronounced for older than younger children. The bilingual advantage was not affected by changing cognitive demands or by using first/second language in memory tasks. The present findings support the cross-language interactivity hypothesis of bilingual advantage.     

Language organization and language change in bilinguals

Two experimental studies with bilingual speakers examined the influence of (I) semantic organization across language, (2) input language change and (3) output language change on speech encoding during a sentence completion task. The first study used fluent Welsh-English bilinguals while the second used fluent French-English bilinguals; all subjects were at school in the U.K. A model proposed how subjects with different degree of overlap in bilingual semantic organization achieved functional separation of the two languages. Predictions derived from this were tested and were substantially confirmed for both groups of bilinguals. It was concluded that subjects have different degrees of overlap in semantic organization of their two languages and that this influences speech encoding where input or output language changes are present.     

Language familiarity effects in short-term memory: The role of output delay and long-term knowledge

Four experiments examined the origins of language familiarity effects in bilingual short-term recall. In Experiments 1A and 1B, bilingual adults were tested on serial recall and probed serial recall of words and nonwords in their first and second languages. A first-language advantage was obtained on both measures, indicating that the beneficial effects of language familiarity are not exclusively attributable to lesser output delay during overt recall. In Experiments 2A and 2B, the same group of bilinguals was tested on serial recall and serial recognition of word lists in both languages. Although a sizeable first-language advantage was obtained on the serial recall measure, recognition performance was comparable in the two languages. On the basis of these results it is suggested that language differences in bilingual immediate memory arise in large part as a consequence of the differential availability of language-specific long-term knowledge with which to support retrieval processes in serial recall.     

Maîtrise de l’oral et de l’écrit en français et en tahitien : une étude longitudinale du CP au CM2 en Polynésie française

Many international scientific studies underline the advantage of bilingual children in oral language. This is especially evident in their meta-linguistic skills, as well as their writing, reading and written expression. Bilingualism could facilitate meta-linguistic development by allowing the child to differentiate early formal and semantic aspects of the code, perceive the arbitrary relationship between “ signified ” and “ significant ” and develop greater cognitive flexibility. This study, conducted in French Polynesia, had examined the specific effect of bilingual program on the morphological awareness and the cross-lingual effects of Tahitian-French transfers via the written word. A group of 128 Polynesian students were followed longitudinally from the end of First Grade to the end of Fifth Grade. Of these 128 students, 59 were part of an experimental group involved beginning in the First Grade, in two successive educational programs with five hours per week of Polynesian language and culture, which included systematic learning of reading and writing in Tahitian. A selection of 69 other students, who had never participated in these programs, constituted the control group. All students were tested each year on their oral language skills in French and Tahitian. At the end of Third Grade, a morphological awareness assessment in French was introduced (Reder et al., 2013), as well as a task of word recognition (TIME3 of Ecalle, 2006), a reading-comprehension (Lobrot, 1980) and spelling tasks (ECS3, Khomsi, 1998). These standardized assessments have been adapted in Tahitian. The first results acknowledged a positive effect of the bilingual education curriculum on Tahitian oral skills and on cross-lingual links between written skills and morphological awareness. In addition, the Tahitian word recognition greatly helped to explain the French written skills, after controlling the level of French morphological awareness.     

Discrimination of coronal stops by bilingual adults: the timing and nature of language interaction

The current study was designed to investigate the timing and nature of interaction between the two languages of bilinguals. For this purpose, we compared discrimination of Canadian French and Canadian English coronal stops by simultaneous bilingual, monolingual and advanced early L2 learners of French and English. French /d/ is phonetically described as dental whereas English /d/ is described as alveolar. Using a categorial AXB task, the performance of all four groups was compared to chance and to the performance of native Hindi listeners. Hindi listeners performed well above chance in discriminating French and English /d/-initial syllables. The discrimination performance of advanced early L2 learners, but not simultaneous bilinguals, was consistent with one merged category for coronal stops in the two languages. The data provide evidence for interaction in L2 learners as well as simultaneous bilinguals; however, the nature of the interaction is different in the two groups.     

Phonotactic probability effect in nonword recall and its relationship with vocabulary in monolingual and bilingual preschoolers

The current study examined to what extent information in long-term memory concerning the distribution of phoneme clusters in a language, so-called long-term phonotactic knowledge, increased the capacity of verbal short-term memory in young language learners and, through increased verbal short-term memory capacity, supported these children’s first and second language vocabulary acquisition. Participants were 67 monolingual Dutch and 60 bilingual Turkish–Dutch 4-year-olds. The superior recall of nonwords with high phonotactic probability compared with nonwords with low phonotactic probability indicated that phonotactic knowledge was supportive for verbal short-term recall in both languages. The extent of this support depended on prior experiences with the language: The Turkish–Dutch children showed a greater phonotactic probability effect in their native language Turkish compared with their Dutch peers, and the monolingual Dutch children outperformed the bilingual Turkish–Dutch children in their native language Dutch. Regression analyses showed that phonotactic knowledge, indicated by the difference in recall of nonwords with high versus low phonotactic probability, was an important predictor of vocabulary in both languages.     

Cross‐linguistic interactions influence reading development in bilinguals: a comparison between early balanced French‐Basque and Spanish‐Basque bilingual children

This study investigates whether orthographic consistency and transparency of languages have an impact on the development of reading strategies and reading sub‐skills (i.e. phonemic awareness and visual attention span) in bilingual children. We evaluated 21 French (opaque)‐Basque (transparent) bilingual children and 21 Spanish (transparent)‐Basque (transparent) bilingual children at Grade 2, and 16 additional children of each group at Grade 5. All of them were assessed in their common language (i.e. Basque) on tasks measuring word and pseudoword reading, phonemic awareness and visual attention span skills. The Spanish speaking groups showed better Basque pseudoword reading and better phonemic awareness abilities than their French speaking peers, but only in the most difficult conditions of the tasks. However, on the visual attention span task, the French‐Basque bilinguals showed the most efficient visual processing strategies to perform the task. Therefore, learning to read in an additional language affected differently Basque literacy skills, depending on whether this additional orthography was opaque (e.g. French) or transparent (e.g. Spanish). Moreover, we showed that the most noteworthy effects of Spanish and French orthographic transparency on Basque performance were related to the size of the phonological and visual grain used to perform the tasks.     

Convergent cortical representation of semantic processing in bilinguals

This study examined whether semantic processes in two languages (English and Spanish) are mediated by a common neural system in fluent bilinguals who acquired their second language years after acquiring their first language. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed while bilingual participants made semantic and nonsemantic decisions about words in Spanish and English. There was greater activation for semantic relative to nonsemantic decisions in left and right frontal regions, with greater left frontal activation. The locations of activations were similar for both languages, and no differences were found when semantic decisions for English and Spanish words were compared directly. These results demonstrate a shared frontal lobe system for semantic analysis of the languages and are consistent with cognitive research on bilingualism indicating that the two languages of a bilingual person access a common semantic system.     

Attentional control in early and later bilingual children

We examined differences in attentional control among school-age children who were monolingual English speakers, early Spanish-English bilinguals (who began speaking both languages by age 3), and later Spanish-English bilingual children (who began speaking English after age 3). Children's attentional control was tested using the Attention Network Test (ANT). All language groups performed equally on ANT networks; however, when controlling for age and verbal ability, groups differed significantly on reaction time. Early bilingual children responded faster on the ANT compared to both monolingual and later bilingual children, suggesting an attentional monitoring advantage for early bilinguals. These results add to evidence of advantaged cognitive functioning among bilinguals and are consistent with the possibility that children who begin speaking a second language earlier in childhood have greater advantages, due either to effects of acquiring a second language earlier or to longer duration of bilingual experience.     

Spoken Language Activation Alters Subsequent Sign Language Activation in L2 Learners of American Sign Language

A large body of literature has characterized unimodal monolingual and bilingual lexicons and how neighborhood density affects lexical access; however there have been relatively fewer studies that generalize these findings to bimodal (M2) second language (L2) learners of sign languages. The goal of the current study was to investigate parallel language activation in M2L2 learners of sign language and to characterize the influence of spoken language and sign language neighborhood density on the activation of ASL signs. A priming paradigm was used in which the neighbors of the sign target were activated with a spoken English word and compared the activation of the targets in sparse and dense neighborhoods. Neighborhood density effects in auditory primed lexical decision task were then compared to previous reports of native deaf signers who were only processing sign language. Results indicated reversed neighborhood density effects in M2L2 learners relative to those in deaf signers such that there were inhibitory effects of handshape density and facilitatory effects of location density. Additionally, increased inhibition for signs in dense handshape neighborhoods was greater for high proficiency L2 learners. These findings support recent models of the hearing bimodal bilingual lexicon, which posit lateral links between spoken language and sign language lexical representations.     

汉语为二语学习者言语产生中的跨语言干扰

采用跨语言长时竞争启动范式探讨汉语为二语学习者言语产生中的跨语言干扰。实验1的被试选择18名俄语为母语者, 实验2选择18名日语为母语者。自变量是命名语言(一语和二语)和学习条件(学过一致、学过不一致和未学过), 因变量是测验阶段被试图片命名的反应时和正确率。实验分为学习阶段和测验阶段, 被试分别用一语和二语命名图片, 观察被试在测验阶段学过一致与学过不一致两种条件下是否都能产生促进效应。实验结果发现, 无论俄语为母语者还是日语为母语者, 被试只有在学过一致条件下的反应时显著快于未学过条件, 而学过不一致条件下的反应时跟未学过没有显著差异。本研究结果表明, 汉语为二语学习者言语产生中存在跨语言干扰, 且语言间书写特征的差异对跨语言干扰没有影响。     

Sub-syllabic Processing in Young Korean–English Bilinguals: Semivowel Placement Differences Between Korean and English

This study investigated the sub-syllabic awareness of two groups of 86 Korean kindergarteners learning English as a foreign language (EFL) or English as a second language (ESL). In addition, it explored the cross-language transfer of sub-syllabic units between Korean and English by taking into account their lexical abilities with respect to the two languages. The participants were assessed in Korean and English based on their sound oddity and similarity judgments with respect to sub-syllabic units in spoken pseudo-syllables containing semivowels (e.g., /j/ and /w/) as well as on a lexical ability test. The results indicate that EFL and ESL children preferred body structure and rime structure, respectively, regardless of the language. These results provide support for the bilingual interactive activation model; that is, bilingual lexicon may be represented in language non-selective access. Further, the differences in semivowel placement between Korean and English may be a possible resource for language-specific sub-syllabic awareness.     

Bilingualism in infancy: first steps in perception and comprehension

Many children grow up in bilingual families and acquire two first languages. Emerging research is advancing the view that the capacity to acquire language can be applied equally to two languages as to one but that bilingual and monolingual acquisition nonetheless differ in some nontrivial ways. To probe the first steps toward acquisition, researchers recently have begun to use experimental methods to study preverbal bilingual infants. We review the literature in this growing field, focusing on how infants growing up bilingual use surface acoustic information to separate, categorize and begin to learn their two languages. These new data invite the expansion of standard linguistic theories to account for how a single architecture can support the acquisition of two languages simultaneously.     

Phonological Awareness and Beginning Reading in Spanish-Speaking ESL First Graders: Research into Practice

In the first study, 30 Spanish-speaking English-as-a-second language (ESL) first graders whose families were Latino immigrants and who received all their school instruction in English completed an assessment battery with both Spanish and English measures of phonological awareness, Verbal IQ (VIQ), oral language proficiency, and single-word reading (real words and pseudowords); they also named English alphabet letters. Phonological awareness in Spanish predicted (a) phonological awareness in English and (b) English word reading; thus, phonological awareness may transfer across first and second languages and across oral and written language. English VIQ and oral language proficiency predicted both English and Spanish word reading, but Spanish VIQ and oral language proficiency did not predict English word reading. In the second study, the 4 males and the 4 females with the lowest reading achievement participated in an instructional design experiment in which empirically supported instructional components for teaching beginning reading to monlingual English speakers were included. These components were phonological awareness training (in both Spanish and English), explicit instruction in alphabetic principle (in English), and repeated reading of engaging English text with comprehension monitoring (in English). Both individual students and the group as a whole increased in real-word reading and pseudoword reading beyond the level expected on the basis of their Spanish or English VIQ or oral proficiency. Implications of this research for school psychology practice are discussed, especially the importance of early reading intervention and progress monitoring for Spanish-speaking ESL first graders.     

Is grammatical gender considered arbitrary or semantically motivated? Evidence from young adult monolinguals,second language learners,and early bilinguals

It is generally assumed that speakers of grammatical gender languages consider grammatical gender arbitrary, but this assumption has never been tested. Research shows that the grammatical gender of nouns can affect perceptions of the masculinity or femininity of the noun's referent in speakers of languages with masculine and feminine noun classes. However, bilingualism facilitates the development of lexical arbitrariness awareness, and could therefore affect awareness of grammatical gender arbitrariness. This study then compared three groups of young adult speakers of a grammatical gender language: monolinguals, early bilinguals, and instructed second language learners. Participants evaluated the gender assignments of 25 nouns of entities (animals, abstract concepts, natural kinds, and artefacts), and answered open and closed questions about grammatical gender. Participants considered grammatical gender as semantically motivated and mostly related gender assignments to perceived masculine or feminine connotations of referents. Knowledge of an additional grammatical gender language was linked to increased awareness of the arbitrariness of first language gender assignments in both early bilinguals and later instructed learners. It is argued that grammatical gender awareness deserves further investigation. Knowing more than one grammatical gender language can increase awareness of grammatical gender arbitrariness. Implications are discussed for language teaching and language reform.     

Influences of vowel and tone variation on emergent word knowledge: a cross‐linguistic investigation

To learn words, infants must be sensitive to native phonological contrast. While lexical tone predominates as a source of phonemic contrast in human languages, there has been little investigation of the influences of lexical tone on word learning. The present study investigates infants’ sensitivity to tone mispronunciations in two groups of infants. For one group (Chinese learners), tone is phonemic in their native language, and for the second group (English learners), tone is non‐phonemic and constituted suprasegmental variation. In Experiment 1, English learners were trained on novel word–object pairings and tested on their recognition of correct pronunciations, tone and vowel mispronunciations of these words at 18 and 24 months. In Experiment 2a, bilingual English‐Chinese learners were tested on a similar task translated into Chinese at the same age intervals. Results demonstrate that non‐tonal learners treated tonal and vowel substitutions alike as mispronunciations at 18 months but only treated vowel substitutions as mispronunciations at 24 months. Tonal learners treated both tonal and vowel substitutions as mispronunciations at both ages. In Experiment 2b, bilingual non‐tone language learners were tested on the same set of tasks replicating a similar set of results as monolingual non‐tone language learners (Experiment 1). Findings point to an early predisposition to treat tone as a defining characteristic of words regardless of its lexical relevance at 18 months. Between 18 and 24 months, learners appear to ascribe lexical relevance to tone in a language‐specific manner. The current study identifies the influences of tone variation on memories for newly learned words and the time period during which lexical tone – a highly frequent constituent of human languages – actually becomes lexical for early learners. Findings are contextualized with prevailing models of the developing lexicon.     

熟练中－英双语者三语词汇的语义通达

通过两个实验运用跨语言重复启动的范式考察熟练中－英双语者对不熟练的第三语言词汇的语义通达方式。实验1以三语为日语的熟练中－英双语者为被试,实验2以三语为法语的熟练中－英双语者为被试,两个实验都发现了显著的跨语言重复启动效应。实验结果表明,熟练双语者尽管已经形成了直接通达二语词汇概念意义的语义通达方式,但其并没有将此方式迁移到对三语词汇概念意义的通达,他们仍然需要以一语词为中介从而间接通达三语词汇的概念意义。综合先前系列研究的结果初步表明,第二语言的熟练水平是影响晚期双语者语义通达方式的主要因素,晚期双语者记忆表征中的语义通达方式在本质上是一种经验性变化