Bilingual advantage in L3 vocabulary acquisition: evidence of a generalized learning benefit among classroom-immersion children. Issue 2 (26th March 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Salomé, Florian; Casalis, Séverine; Commissaire, Eva
• Is Part Of: Bilingualism. Volume 25:Issue 2(2022)
• Page Start: 242
• Page End: 255
• Publication Date: 2022-03-26
• Subjects: bilingualism -- dual language immersion -- third language acquisition -- vocabulary learning -- cross-linguistic similarities/cognates; Bilingualism -- Periodicals; Psycholinguistics -- Periodicals; Language acquisition -- Periodicals; 404.2
• DOI: 10.1017/S1366728921000687
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1366-7289

Abstract

Abstract: The present study explored whether emergent bilingual children showed enhanced abilities to learn L3 vocabulary including written, spoken and conceptual forms compared to monolinguals, and the impact of L2/L3 cross-language similarities on such an effect. To this end, we contrasted the English word learning performance of French fifth-graders attending either a monolingual school program or a classroom-immersion program with German as an L2. Half of the items to be learned were German/English (L2/L3) cognate words while the other half were monolingual English (L3) words. Learning was assessed with a forced-choice recognition task, a go/no-go auditive recognition task and an orthographic judgment task. Results yielded a generalized bilingual advantage, with classroom-immersion children outperforming monolinguals on all tasks, irrespective of cognateness, except for the orthographic task. These findings advocate for a bilingual advantage in children that is globally not driven by the specific language properties of cognates, except for the written modality.