Monolingual and multilingual discrimination of written sequences' readability

Abstract

Multilingual literate landscapes are ubiquitous input for children in many places in the world. This type of input (albeit visual only) may propel literacy awareness, integration and cognitive assimilation of different writing and notational systems even before schooling. This study explores quantitatively and qualitatively the ways in which young multilingual children understand and interpret the principles underlying different writing systems. The focus is to compare how bilingual and monolingual children judge ‘readable and non-readable’ representations which are alphabetic or non-alphabetic (single, other or mixed); and whether readable strings comply with a qualitative and quantitative condition assigned to the string of signs presented. There are similarities as well as differences in the distinction as ‘readable’ between alphabetic and non-alphabetic notations among bilingual Ethiopian children and monolingual non-Ethiopian children who are pre-readers. Both groups regard as ‘readable’ sequences that contain varied and multiple combinations of alphabetic signs. There are revealing differences between the groups as to the quantity of signs in the sequence and whether it comes from a single, familiar or mixed alphabet. The Ethiopian bilingual children are more inclined to regard different alphabetic systems—whether they combine signs from within a single alphabet or from multiple alphabets—and tend to ‘detect’ them as ‘readable’ more so than non-Ethiopian monolinguals.

Keywords:

• Emergent writing
• Multilingual development
• Literacy
• Writing development

I am indebted to Or for data collection, Leora Roth for data coding and analysis, four kindergarten teachers (Tehila, Aviva, Alicia and Rutie), Naomi Tene the Kindergarten Inspector for issuing permission to collect data at these sites. My special gratitude goes to all the children who participated in good spirit and enthusiasm. Many thanks to Eyal Rabin for statistical analysis, Prof. Gili Goldsweig, Mr Ariel Goldstein, Prof. Liliana Tolchinsky and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on an early version of this manuscript. They are not, of course, responsible for any shortcomings or omissions.

I am indebted to Or for data collection, Leora Roth for data coding and analysis, four kindergarten teachers (Tehila, Aviva, Alicia and Rutie), Naomi Tene the Kindergarten Inspector for issuing permission to collect data at these sites. My special gratitude goes to all the children who participated in good spirit and enthusiasm. Many thanks to Eyal Rabin for statistical analysis, Prof. Gili Goldsweig, Mr Ariel Goldstein, Prof. Liliana Tolchinsky and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on an early version of this manuscript. They are not, of course, responsible for any shortcomings or omissions.

Notes

¹ The population's proportion at the time of data collection in this area was one third monolingual veteran Israeli and 2/3 immigrant Israeli families, as reflected in the proportions of children sampled.

² The use of the word ‘alphabetic’ here does not mean the type of writing system but rather a notation which represents letters that children regard as readable as opposed to numbers or other graphic representations (icons, geometrical forms).

³ We know that children at this age can answer correctly to such questions (Ferreiro and Teberosky, 1982; Lavine, 1977) and we also know that children had a 50% chance of getting the answer correct (or incorrect). However, since this paper is based on comparisons either within groups or between groups the errors should have about the same distribution within the groups and the comparison of each group to itself (between tasks) and each group to the other still show differences nullifying the errors.

⁴ Hereafter all our graphs represent group average percentage of number of participants who chose the desired response.