Disentangling the Impact of Bilingualism and SES in Literacy Skills of Language-Minority Bilingual Children and Monolingual Peers Exposed to French

Abstract

In the present study, we aimed to disentangle the impact of bilingualism and socioeconomic status (SES) on literacy in language-minority bilingual children (LMBC) and monolinguals exposed to French. We also wanted to explore the role of these two factors on cognitive and language skills, i.e., verbal knowledge (VK), morphosyntactic comprehension (MC), and phonological short-term memory (PSTM), well known to be important predictors of literacy acquisition. We compared LMBC with low and medium-high SES, and monolinguals with low and medium-high SES. All the children attended Grades 3, 4, and 5. We found that LMBC underperformed monolinguals on VK and MC. Low SES children showed lower scores compared to medium-high SES children on VK, MC, and PSTM. With regard to literacy, LMBC underperformed monolinguals on text and irregular word reading. Low SES children underperformed medium-high SES children only in regular word reading and pseudoword spelling. As a whole, bilingualism had an effect on measures involving lexical components, while SES had a more widespread effect on cognitive and language skills. The results are discussed considering implications for research, clinical, and educational settings.

Acknowledgment

No funding was obtained for this research.

Ethical approval

The entire study was conducted according to the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki (2008) and it was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the Local Education Authority of the Montpellier Academy (France) (31 January 2019). Parents gave written and informed consent for their child’s participation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.