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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2021

Florian Salomé ,
Séverine Casalis Open the ORCID record for Séverine Casalis [Opens in a new window]  and
Eva Commissaire Open the ORCID record for Eva Commissaire [Opens in a new window]
Florian Salomé
Affiliation:
Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9193 – SCALab – Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, F-59000 Lille, France
Séverine Casalis*
Affiliation:
Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 9193 – SCALab – Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives, F-59000 Lille, France
Eva Commissaire
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie des Cognitions (LPC-EA4440), Université de Strasbourg, 67000 Strasbourg, France
*
Address for correspondence: Séverine Casalis, E-mail: severine.casalis@univ-lille.fr
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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.

Keywords

bilingualismdual language immersionthird language acquisitionvocabulary learningcross-linguistic similarities/cognates
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , March 2022 , pp. 242 - 255
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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