Majority language vocabulary and nonword repetition skills in children attending minority language immersion education

Abstract

The present study examined nonword repetition (NWR) and comprehension/production of single-word vocabulary in the majority language (English) in six- to eight-year-old English-Gaelic emergent bilingual children attending Gaelic-medium primary education (GMPE) (primary years 2 and 3). GMPE is an immersion education model found in Scotland where the minority language, Gaelic, is the language of instruction, whereas English is the majority community language, not supported in school in the first three years of primary schooling. All children spoke English as their first language (L1) and had varying exposure to the second language (L2) Gaelic outside the school setting. We investigated how individual factors, such as age and frequency of exposure, and psycholinguistic factors, such as task modality, word class (for vocabulary), frequency, length, and prosody (for NWR), influenced performance. Later exposure to Gaelic and higher nonverbal IQ were contributing predictors of performance for English vocabulary. For NWR, participants with earlier and longer exposure to Gaelic who also used both languages at home more performed significantly better on this task. These results suggest that minority language immersion education differentially affects majority language abilities; later L2 onset benefited L1 vocabulary learning, whereas earlier L2 onset boosted L1 NWR skills in these bilinguals.

Mind the gap: Psycholinguistic and individual factors affecting expressive and receptive vocabulary skills in English-Gaelic bilingual children

“…In the present study, we found that children had overall higher accuracy on the receptive than the expressive tasks, in line with previous studies in the literature (e.g., Haman et al, 2015, for an overview). In line with what was reported for the majority L1 in Chondrogianni et al (2022), the item-level factors were stronger predictors of children’s performance. In the present study, word class interacted with CI to differentially modulate accuracy.…”

“…Despite its limitations and complexity, subjective AoA ratings have been found to be consistent across speakers and languages regardless of their majority or minority status in acquisition studies based on adult AoA ratings as our study (Haman et al, 2015;Łuniewska et al, 2019) and to strongly correlate with parental reports on young children's lexical development (Łuniewska et al, 2016). AoA also reliably predicted accuracy on nouns and verbs in expressive and receptive vocabulary tasks similar to the ones used in the present study with monolingual and bilingual children, with the earlier the AoA, the higher the accuracy on the word (Altman et al, 2017;Juhasz, 2005;van Wonderen & Unsworth, 2020), and in certain cases, AoA overrode effects of the child's chronological age (Chondrogianni et al, 2022). This might be because the earlier a word is acquired the more experience the speaker has with using this word in various contexts and the easier it is to access it (see Menenti & Burani, 2007 for similar findings regarding lexical processing speed).…”

“…Studies investigating the development of the minority language in immersion education have shown that the language used at home affects both the minority and the majority vocabulary skills. In previous research focusing on the majority language skills (English) of the same English-Gaelic bilingual children as in this study, children who were exposed to Gaelic later in childhood tended to have larger vocabularies in English than children with an earlier age of exposure (AoE), although AoE was a contributing factor rather than a strong predictor in the study (Chondrogianni et al, 2022). The effect of exposure is larger on minority vocabulary development because it reinforces the contexts outside the school context where the minority language can be used (Dijkstra et al, 2016; Hoff et al, 2014; Gathercole et al, 2008; O’Toole et al, 2019; Smithson et al, 2014).…”

“…The present study complements the study that focused on the majority L1 English language abilities of the same children as the ones in this analysis (Chondrogianni et al, 2022). In that study, we examined the relationship between English vocabulary development and nonword repetition and the psycholinguistic (e.g., number of syllables and consonants, neighbourhood density, among others) and individual factors that modulated performance on these tasks.…”

“…Two studies are particularly relevant for the present study due to the immersion context they investigated and the adopted tasks. Chondrogianni et al (2022) focused on the majority language abilities (English) of the English-Gaelic bilingual children in GMPE using the British English version of the CLT (Haman et al, 2015). They found that children performed better on English nouns than on verbs and on the English receptive than the expressive task, although, overall, their performance across both modalities was high (overall receptive: 98%; overall expressive: 85%).…”