The interplay of lexical and grammatical development in Greek-Albanian bilingual children: evidence from the majority and the heritage language

ABSTRACT

The present paper aims to investigate the interplay of lexical and grammatical development in school-aged Greek-Albanian bilingual children by providing evidence both from majority, Greek, and heritage, Albanian. To this end, 47 8 to 10-year-old bilingual children were tested by means of expressive vocabulary tests in Greek and in Albanian, while their grammatical skills were evaluated by means of the LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task administered in both languages. Additionally, input-related measures in both languages, such as oral language practices, literacy, and educational practices were used to assess the bilingual experience and examine how it would correlate with lexical and grammatical skills. The analysis showed that within each language, lexical and grammatical skills were closely related both for the majority and the heritage language, while when examining across-language effects, grammatical skills in the heritage language were correlated with grammatical skills in the majority language. Concerning the role of input, we found that input in the heritage language supported skills both in the heritage and the majority language. The study's contribution is that by providing novel evidence from this specific language pair it shows that supporting the use of heritage language can boost language skills in both languages.

KEYWORDS:

• child bilingualism
• heritage language
• majority language
• lexicon
• grammatical development
• Albanian
• Greek

Acknowledgements

This research was co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund – ESF) and 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.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For studies on Greek as a heritage language for child data see Daskalaki et al. (2019), for adult data see Giannakou (2018) and Alexiadou et al. (2021) among others.

2 In the present study, the focus is the overall grammatical development of bilinguals and not the individual grammatical differences of the two languages, hence a detailed discussion of the similarities and the differences of the two languages is outside the scope of the study.

3 On the value of conceptual scoring see also Gross, Buac, and Kaushanskaya (2014).

4 Reception classes in Greek state primary schools help pupils with limited skills in the majority language to ease their way to the monolingual Greek classes; L2 Greek language teaching along with explanations and guidance on various school subjects in the heritage language of the pupil are provided (www.diapolis.auth.gr).

5 On the role of z-score transformation in comparing data sets with different units of measurement or data sets with different ranges see Hunter and Hamilton (2002).

6 For more information on regression analysis and managing datasets see Menard (2011), Siegel and Wagner (2022) and Winter (2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Social Fund [grant number MIS377313].

Notes on contributors

Maria Kaltsa

Dr. Maria Kaltsa is a researcher at the Department of Theoretical & Applied Linguistics of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and she is currently the PI of the Research Project DemLENS (Linguistic Perspectives on Dementia funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation, H.F.R.I.). Her scientific interests involve lexicon, (morpho)syntax, interface phenomena, L1/L2 acquisition, multilingualism, first language attrition, language processing and dementia and she has published her work in a number of journals such as Frontiers in Psychology, International Journal of Bilingualism, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and Languages among others.

Alexandra Prentza

Dr. Alexandra Prentza is a Teaching Fellow at the School of Philology at the University of Ioannina, Greece. Her research interests concern language acquisition, bilingualism and heritage languages with an emphasis on grammatical and lexical development. Her work has been published in a number of international journals (e.g., Languages, International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism), presented in international conferences and published in relevant proceedings (e.g., European Second Language Acquisition Association Conference, International Conference on Greek Linguistics, International Symposium on Theoretical & Applied Linguistics).

Leonarda Prela

Leonarda Prela is a PhD researcher at the Department of English and American Studies at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany). Her doctoral work investigates individual differences in language acquisition and attainment. She is particularly interested in bilingualism and the focus of her PhD is on the relationship between the first (L1) and second language (L2) among adult Greek-English bilingual speakers. In addition to her research, she is also involved in teaching activities related to the field of second language acquisition (SLA) and multilingualism at the same university.

Ianthi Maria Tsimpli

Professor Ianthi Maria Tsimpli is Chair of English and Applied Linguistics and Co-Chair at the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. She works on literacy and cognition, first and second language acquisition, bilingualism and language disorders. She is Associate Editor of Lingua and member of the Editorial Board of the journals Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Second Language Research, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, Journal of Applied Linguistics, Biolinguistics, Journal of Greek Linguistics and of the Book Series “Language Acquisition and Language Disorders”.