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Abstract
The article presents the results of an investigation where 86 bilingual and 86 monolingual pupils from grades 3, 6 and 9 in the Finland‐Swedish comprehensive schools are compared. The material is free written compositions in Swedish. The pupils are matched with respect to sex, age, socio‐economic background and general intellectual ability. The study is concerned with errors on the levels of orthography, morphology, syntax, morphosyntax, vocabulary and phraseology. The main emphasis is on interference. The error frequency has been correlated with some background variables.
On the syntactic level, especially as regards word order, there are significant differences between the two groups, the bilinguals producing significantly more errors. This is also true of the levels of vocabulary and phraseology. Interference appears most clearly within vocabulary, but can also be noted within syntax.
As regards background variables, the error frequency correlates most significantly with the pupils’ school marks. No significant correlations can be established between error frequency and the background variables of socio‐economic status and language use within the family. On the other hand, error frequency correlates significantly with the environmental factors of mass media and the language of the neighbourhood.