The role of educational setting in the development of verbal aspect and executive functions: evidence from Greek-German bilingual children

ABSTRACT

The present study aims at exploring: (a) the role of the educational setting in the acquisition of aspect and executive functions (i.e. updating) skills, (b) the acquisition of the aspectual features in Greek-German bilingual children and (c) the impact of updating on the acquisition of aspect. Imperfective aspect has been found to be acquired later than perfective in previous studies. Moreover, a bilingual educational setting seems to enhance not only cognitive but also linguistic abilities. The participants of the present study are Greek-German bilingual children, who attend a bilingual or a Greek dominant educational setting. They were tested in two baseline tasks, two linguistic tasks and an executive function, updating, task. The findings reveal that bilinguals who attend a monolingual educational setting performed similarly to the monolingual control group on aspect, whereas bilinguals who attend a bilingual educational setting scored lower than the monolinguals. In the updating task, the students of the bilingual educational setting scored higher than the other groups. Overall, our findings suggest that the bilingual educational setting seems to boost executive function (updating) skills, while the acquisition of aspect is affected by vocabulary knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• bilingualism
• biliteracy
• executive functions
• verbal aspect

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the directors of the schools, the parents and their children for their participation in our study. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper. All errors remain of course ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ifigeneia Dosi is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Democritus University of Thrace, working on linguistic and cognitive abilities in Specific Language Impairment. She completed her doctoral dissertation on bilingualism and cognitive abilities at the School of Philology (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). Her doctoral research was funded by the Thales project Bilingual Acquisition & Bilingual Education (BALED). She participated in projects on bilingualism and second language acquisition (i.e. BALED; Cognition, Literacy and Bilingualism in Greek-German-speaking children, CoLiBi; Education of Foreign and Repatriated Students, DIAPOLIS). Within the framework of the aforementioned projects, she has conducted research in schools across Albania, Germany and in the USA and took part in international conferences across Europe and in the USA. Since 2016 she has been working as a lecturer at Democritus University of Thrace and Hellenic Open University. Her research interests lie in the areas of: bi- and multilingualism, language and cognitive abilities in typical development and in (developmental and acquired) language disorders.

Despina Papadopoulou is Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Essex (2002) in the field of sentence processing; more specifically, she explored the parsing routines in the first and the second language. She is currently the Principal Investigator of ESR14 ‘Grammatical and vocabulary development in refugee children’ (The Multi Mind, Marie Curie Actions). She coordinated projects on ‘Language production in Greek. Thematic roles and word order’ (Research grant from the Research Committee of A.U.Th. 2011) and on ‘Educational Support of Reception Classes’ [Project: Education of foreign and repatriated pupils (NSRF 2007-2013)]. Her research interests lie in the areas of language processing, language acquisition, bilingualism, language disorders, second language learning and teaching.

Notes

1 Abbreviations used in interlinear glosses:

acc = Accusative     past = Past tense

dat = Dative       perf = Perfective

imp = Imperfective     pres = Present tense

inf = Infinitive      3s = 3. Singular

2 Before running the regression analyses, we conducted correlations in order to explore which independent variables (home language history, current language use, early and current literacy practices, vocabulary knowledge, updating skills) correlated with the dependent variable (performance on the comprehension task). In the regression analyses, we only entered the variables that were found to significantly correlate with the total scores on the task. Thus, the scores on the updating task were not entered since they were not found to correlate with the dependent variable (p = .770).

3 We also set the results of current literacy as a covariate; however, the differences still existed, indicating that current literacy cannot explain the differences between the groups (p = .002).

4 These were the only variables that were found to correlate with the scores on the updating task.

Additional information

Funding

This was co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF) and the Greek national funds through the Operational Program ‘Education and Lifelong Learning’ of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) – Research Funding Program: Thales. Investing in knowledge society through the European Social Fund. Thales FP7 Project ‘Bilingual Acquisition & Bilingual Education: The Development of Linguistic & Cognitive Abilities in Different Types of Bilingualism’ (BALED – Award No. MIS377313). PI: Ianthi Maria Tsimpli.