The development of the cognate advantage from elementary to middle school years in French-English bilinguals attending a dual language program in France

ABSTRACT

The cognate advantage in bilingual children varies in strength across groups and individuals, in particular on receptive measures (e.g. picture-identification). This variation may be due to children’s developing ability to benefit from cognates in such tasks, yet longitudinal studies of this phenomenon, especially with older children, are rare. Using longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses of picture-identification performance in French and English from 37 bilingual children attending a dual language program in France, this study investigates the cognate advantage across a wide range of ages (6–13 years old). The influence of children’s relative exposure on the cognate advantage is also investigated. We find that significant differences in cognate versus non-cognate performance emerge only after the first years of elementary school. Children show marked growth in late elementary and middle school years, but only on the English task. The strength of the cognate advantage in picture-ID is inversely related to exposure to that language. These findings are discussed in relation to the nature of these children’s exposure and properties of cognates in the two languages. Implications for dual language pedagogy are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingual education
• childhood bilingualism
• dual language program
• language ability
• metalinguistic knowledge
• second language acquisition

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the children and families that participated in the study and to the principal and teaching staff for their interest, support and assistance collecting the data for this project.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 All participants providing data for the first 4 years of INEXDEB were included except for one child, excluded as she received more than 10% exposure to a third language.

2 See Cohen and Mazur-Palandre (2018), for full details of how current exposure was calculated.

3 The omitted BPVS item was terpsichorean, for which no suitable one-word translation could be found in French.

4 Instructions were as follows:

How similar do [the word pairs] sound? Try to focus only on the way they sound, ignoring how they are written. Assign them a value from 1 to 7 with 1 being completely different in sound and 7 being completely similar in sound.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from: LabEx Aslan (ANR-10-LABX-0081) at the University of Lyon within the « Investissements d’Avenir » (ANR-11-IDEX-0007) French state programme run by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR); Laboratoire de l’éducation (LLE, UMS 3773); Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, Lyon.

Notes on contributors

Erin Quirk

Erin Quirk is a postdoctoral fellow in the Psychology Department at Concordia University. She investigates multilingualism in children. Her research focuses particularly on the relationship between the language environment and children's outcomes in trilingual and heritage language acquisition, as well as the beliefs and practices of multilingual families.

Cathy Cohen

Cathy Cohen is an associate professor in English and Linguistics at the College of Education at the University of Lyon 1. Her research focuses on the acquisition and development of bilingualism in children, with a particular focus on the influence of input factors on the acquisition of bilingualism; the development of narrative skills (micro and macro structure); family language practices; and the development of cultural identity.