Comparison of language awareness in Kurdish-Persian bilingual children and Persian monolingual children

Abstract

The present study examines language awareness between bilinguals and monolingual children. Language awareness is a person's explicit understanding of language and its role in thinking, learning, and social life, which is associated with executive functioning. Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS) test was designed to evaluate executive functioning. The test includes two parts: verbal and non-verbal. In this study, the verbal part including Twenty Questions, Word context, and proverb of D-KEFS was used. Kurdish-Persian bilinguals and Persian monolinguals attended this study. The results showed that in the Twenty Questions, word context, and proverb, there was a significant difference between bilinguals and monolinguals. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in both twenty-question and word context tests, while they performed lower on the proverb test. It can be concluded that bilingualism affects language awareness and also influences different aspects of executive functioning in different manners.

Keywords:

• Bilingualism
• D-KEFS task
• executive functioning
• language awareness