Journal Article

Bilingual advantage in L3 vocabulary acquisition: evidence of a generalized learning benefit among classroom-immersion children

Salomé, Florian, Commissaire, Eva, Casalis, Séverine

2022

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press,Cambridge University Press (CUP)
• Subject: Academic achievement / Acknowledgment / Advantages / Bilingualism / Child Development / Children / Classrooms / Cognates / Educational activities / Elementary school students / English as a second language learning / Foreign language learning / French language / German as a second language / Humanities and Social Sciences / Hypotheses / Immersion programs / Judgment / Learning / Memory / Monolingualism / Native languages / Phonology / Property / Psychology / Recognition / Second Language Learning / Second language vocabulary learning / Third language learning / Vocabulary / Vocabulary Development