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Abstract
Anglophone children in Grades 2 and 5 who attended an intensive French immersion program were examined for linguistic and metalinguistic ability in English and French. Measures of linguistic proficiency (vocabulary and grammatical knowledge) were consistently higher in English and remained so even after 5 years of immersion education in French. Measures of metalinguistic ability (letter fluency and ignoring semantic anomalies in sentence judgments) in French improved significantly over the two grades studied and closed the gap (letter fluency) or caught up with (sentence judgments) similar performance in English. This dissociation between developmental trajectories for linguistic and metalinguistic development is exactly the pattern expected for fully bilingual children, endorsing immersion education as a route to bilingualism.
Acknowledgement
This work was partially supported by grant R01HD052523 from the US National Institutes of Health and by grant A2559 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to EB. We thank the students and staff at the school for taking part in this study. We also wish to thank Kathleen Peets for her contribution to organizing the study, Tashua Case for coordinating the data collection, Camille Blochet for helping with data collection, and Raluca Barac for assistance in the preliminary statistical analyses.
Notes
1. All analyses were repeated, excluding the 10 children who spoke another language at home, and none of the results changed.
2. Reaction time data are intended to provide an index of cognitive processing, but when RTs exceed approximately 1.5 seconds, they no longer indicate cognitive processes.