Abstract
The topic of the present dissertation is to investigate how bilingualism affects language, cognitive and narrative abilities in bilingual children. 209 Greek-English, Greek-German and Greek-Albanian bilingual children aged from 8 to 12 years old divided into two age groups (8-10 and 10-12 years old) took part in the study along with 100 monolingual Greek children. The children completed baseline and experimental tasks measuring their vocabulary, grammar, cognitive skills and narrative production abilities. Their ability to produce narrations while writing and speaking was measured using off-line methodology. A wealth of studies has investigated how the experience of being bilingual shapes our language and cognitive abilities and the way we produce narratives. In terms of their language abilities, bilingual children seem to have smaller vocabularies compared to their monolingual peers. However, the results of our research indicate that vocabulary acquisition by bilinguals in some groups ...
The topic of the present dissertation is to investigate how bilingualism affects language, cognitive and narrative abilities in bilingual children. 209 Greek-English, Greek-German and Greek-Albanian bilingual children aged from 8 to 12 years old divided into two age groups (8-10 and 10-12 years old) took part in the study along with 100 monolingual Greek children. The children completed baseline and experimental tasks measuring their vocabulary, grammar, cognitive skills and narrative production abilities. Their ability to produce narrations while writing and speaking was measured using off-line methodology. A wealth of studies has investigated how the experience of being bilingual shapes our language and cognitive abilities and the way we produce narratives. In terms of their language abilities, bilingual children seem to have smaller vocabularies compared to their monolingual peers. However, the results of our research indicate that vocabulary acquisition by bilinguals in some groups is comparable to that of their monolingual peers, with the amount of input being the determining factor of vocabulary size. The grammatical abilities of bilingual children may differ from those of monolinguals depending on the grammatical structure tested (Marinis and Chondrogianni 2010), but the present research indicates that some groups of bilinguals are comparable to their monolingual peer, with Age of Onset of exposure to Greek and the level of their Greek vocabulary playing an important role. In terms of their cognitive abilities, there is conflicting evidence about whether or not bilingualism leads to advantages in Executive Functions, i.e. the cognitive processes responsible for goal-oriented behaviour, the capacity to think ahead, suppress impulses, and temporarily hold information. Many studies have shown that the systematic use of two languages leads to a bilingual advantage in cognitive control (Adesope, Lavin,Thompson and Ungerleider 2010), but not all studies have found this bilingual advantage (see, for instance, Namazi and Thordardottir 2010). Our research adds a new variable in this domain, since we provide evidence that better performance in cognitive skills is connected to the educational context which the bilingual child attends. Specifically, balanced exposure to the two languages within the framework of bilingual education and bi-literacy ensures better performance. In terms of the quality of bilingual children’s narrative production, a growing body of research has shown that narrative development is a lengthy process which continues well into school years and is closely related to discourse pragmatic development (Berman 2004). Narrative assessment is a highly contextualized task that can predict children’s literacy development (Bishop and Edmundson 1987). Within narrative abilities, a distinction is made between skills at the level of macrostructure, on the one hand, and microstructure on the other. Macrostructure refers to the global coherence of a story (e.g. Story Grammar and character reference), while microstructure is concerned with measures such as narrative length, local coherence and syntactic complexity (Gagarina, Klop, Bohnacker, Kunnari, Tantele, Välimaa, Balčiūnienė and Walters 2012). With respect to the macrostructure measures, one of the objectives of the dissertation was to establish how character reference (measured by form-function distributions and referential ambiguity) and Story Grammar in the bilinguals’ narratives is affected by bilingualism (bilinguals vs. monolinguals), area of residence (bilinguals abroad vs. bilinguals in Greece) and language pair (Greek-German vs. Greek-English vs. Greek-Albanian), and how dominance (measured by the difference between the two vocabulary scores and by demographic factors), balanced educational system and cognitive abilities interact with the macrostructure measures. The results indicate that there is a bilingual advantage in macrostructure measures, which is closely linked to the balanced bilingual educational settings that children may attend as well as their cognitive abilities .As for the performance in microstructure measures, some disadvantages of bilinguals have been noted in certain cases. We found that morphosyntax (i.e. vocabulary in Greek and Sentence Repetition Task in Greek) and external factors such as early literacy-preparedness can explain most variability found in the bilingual data. The internal factors (i.e. cognitive skills) do not seem to contribute in this domain, with the sole exception of adverbial clauses in the oral narrative retellings produced by the younger age group where the bilingual advantage detected correlates with bilinguals’ cognitive skills.This thesis provides new data on the role of bilingualism in the development of language, cognition, and narrative production of bilingual children. The outcome of this work reveals for the first time that learning to read and write in two languages is beneficial for the development of language, cognition, and narrative production, a fact that may have implications for the education of bilingual children as a whole.
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