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British Journal of Educational Psychology (2013), 83, 686–702 © 2013 The British Psychological Society www.wileyonlinelibrary.com

Second-language learners’ advantage in metalinguistic awareness: A question of languages’ characteristics Fanny Reder1, Nathalie Marec-Breton2, Jean-Emile Gombert2 and Elisabeth Demont1* 1

Universite´ de Strasbourg, France Universite´ de Rennes, France

2

Background. The awareness of the formal structure of language has been widely studied in the literature but less in a bilingualism context. Even less with second-language learners (SLL) who are acquiring their second language (L2) and are not considered as bilinguals. Aims. This study aimed at providing an investigation of young SLL’s skills in phonological, morphological and syntactic awareness. Samples. Ninety-five French first graders participated in our study. Children were divided into two groups: monolinguals versus SLL of German (i.e., L1 = French, L2 = German). Method. Both groups completed two phonological tasks (i.e., phonological categorization and deletion). They also completed four morphological tasks evaluating their morphological awareness on two distinct aspects (i.e., affixes and compounds). Finally, they were evaluated on a syntactic awareness task. Results. The main findings highlighted a bilingual superiority for compounds morphological and syntactic awareness but not for affixes morphological and phonological awareness. Conclusions. The second-language learning advantage was observed on dimensions distinguishing the two languages (i.e., compounds morphology and syntax) but not on shared affixes morphological and phonological dimensions. Thus, results are discussed in light of languages’ characteristics and bilingualism proficiency.

Authors have studied the effects of bilingualism on vocabulary acquisition, language comprehension development and more recently have started a more detailed analysis of another skill: metalinguistic abilities. We were interested in studying the effect of early second-language learning on the development of first-language metalinguistic abilities. To

*Correspondence should be addressed to Elisabeth Demont, 12, rue Goethe 67000 Strasbourg, France (e-mail: elisabeth. [email protected]). DOI:10.1111/bjep.12003

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reach this goal, we have investigated three metalinguistic abilities (phonological, morphological and syntactic awareness) of French children within the context of a German partial immersion programme. Before we outline the literature about bilingualism, let us take a moment for remembering concepts of phonological, morphological and syntactic awareness.

Phonological, morphological and syntactic awareness Metalinguistic awareness is defined as the speaker’s ability to distance himself from the content of speech in order to pay attention to the structural features of language and to the language’s properties as an object. Then, the speaker can implement a conscious thought and manipulation of the structural features of language also leading him to develop his semantic abilities (Gombert, 1992). Several metalinguistic abilities are distinguished according to formal linguistic aspects: phonological, morphological or syntactic awareness. Phonological awareness corresponds to the ability to identify and manipulate sounds within words. Different units of phonological awareness are generally distinguished, like for example the syllable (smallest phonetic entity, which is independent from an articulatory and perceptive point of view) and the phoneme (smallest unit, which can be isolated by segmentation) (Goswami, Ziegler & Richardson, 2005). Morphological awareness is defined as the ability to manipulate and reflect on morphological units within words (Carlisle, 2003; McBride-Chang et al., 2005). Words can be separated into monomorphemic words and multi-morphemic words (or complex words). For example, the word accept is made of only one morpheme, whereas the word unacceptable is a morphologically complex word composed of three morphemes: the prefix un, the base accept and the suffix able. So, morphological units include base word and affixes (Apel & Thomas-Tate, 2009). A base word can be defined as the smallest meaningful unit of language that ensures a lexical unit its individuality among all the other lexical units. Affixes can be divided into two categories: inflectional affixes and derivational affixes. Inflectional affixes refer to tense, gender or plurality markers and, thus, represent a grammatical function (e.g., teachers). Derivational affixes can be divided into two sub-categories. On the one hand, suffixes and prefixes allow for the creation of new words by changing the meaning or the grammatical category of a base word (e.g., hope ? hopeless) (Clin, Wade-Woolley & Heggie, 2009). On the other hand, compound words morphology allow for the creation of new words by combining two or more words (e.g., catfish) (Kuo & Anderson, 2006). Finally, syntactic awareness refers to the grammatical structure of sentences, such as the order of words within a sentence. For example, in English or French, subject, verb and object phrase appear in this order. The awareness of the formal structure of language develops after vocabulary and language comprehension, around the age of 5 or 6 years, when children need to analyse these aspects to enter into literacy (Gombert, 1992). These three metalinguistic awareness (i.e., phonological, morphological and syntactic awareness) are first present at a implicit level (‘epilinguistic level’), then thanks to their close and reciprocal relationship with reading, they gradually become conscious (‘metalinguistic level’). Indeed, children first have simplistic linguistic abilities. Those are then stored and reorganized in long-term memory and lead children to ‘epilinguistic abilities’ on which they can rely at the very beginning of literacy instruction. Then, by being confronted to reading and written materials at the time of literacy instruction, children gradually become aware of their implicit knowledge and process to their updating by making them more

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conscious (‘metalinguistic level’). Thus, literacy instruction favours the transition from an epilinguistic to a metalinguistic process and later the development of the explicit linguistic knowledge and the progress in reading reinforce one another (Kuo & Anderson, 2006). Indeed, a close and reciprocal relationship has been found in several studies between reading and phonological awareness (e.g., Goswami et al., 2005), morphological awareness (e.g., Cole´, Bouton, Leuwers, Casalis & Sprenger-Charolles, 2012) as well as syntactic awareness (e.g., Rego, 1997).

Metalinguistic awareness in a bilingual context Over the past decade, empirical data on the development of metalinguistic awareness of bilingual children have led to contradictory conclusions. Some authors did not find any privileged acquisition of phonological awareness for bilinguals (Bialystok, Luk & Kwan, 2005a; Goldstein, Fabiano & Washington, 2005). For example, in a study conducted by Goldstein et al. (2005), simultaneous English/Spanish bilingual children of five years showed similar performances on a syllabic segmentation task than those of their English and Spanish monolingual peers. Contrary to this, several studies have reported a bilingual advantage on phonological awareness (Campbell & Sais, 1995; Kovelman, Baker & Petitto, 2008). For example, Campbell and Sais (1995) showed that simultaneous English/Italian bilingual preschoolers obtained greater performances on a phonological manipulation task than those of their English monolingual peers. Thus, their results underlined that exposure to a second language (L2) at a pre-literate stage improved phonological awareness. Several variables seem to be the cause of these conflicting issues. The disparate findings can notably be resolved by considering the age at which L2 has been acquired (Bialystok, McBride-Chang & Luk, 2005b). For example, Kovelman et al. (2008) indicated that first bilingual exposure at an early age has a positive effect on phonological awareness: Spanish/English bilinguals exposed to the L2 at the age of 0–3 years outperformed those exposed at the age of three to 6 years. Thus, it is important to distinguish bilingual children, who acquired their two languages at the same time from ‘second-language learners’ (SLL), who acquired their L2 on the basis of the first mastered language (Bialystok et al., 2005b). Usually, in the latter group, children begin their L2 acquisition at school, either in traditional elementary classes or starting in kindergarten in immersion programmes during which curriculum is taught in the L2. Bilingualism impact also seems to depend on the proficiency level in the two languages. A greater advantage in phonological awareness is observed for children who are fully bilingual (high proficiency in both languages) and a moderate or null advantage is found for children who are acquiring their L2 (low proficiency in both languages) (Bialystok et al., 2005b; Chen, Ku, Koyama, Anderson & Li, 2008). For example, Chen et al. (2008) evaluated first-, secondand fourth-grade Cantonese speakers who attended Mandarin immersion programme at school. Their results indicated that children’s performance on a phonological awareness task in a language was affected by their proficiency in the language of testing. Some authors think that a bilingual advantage can only be found for children who reach a threshold proficiency level in both languages (Cummins, 1979). Some others talk about a relative threshold beyond which positive impact can be expected (Cromdal, 1999). In a longitudinal study (Grades 3–4) comparing French monolingual children with French children learning to speak Occitan (a French regional language), Laurent and Martinot (2010) found that a bilingual advantage in phonological awareness only appears in Grade 4 (i.e., after five consecutive years of bilingual classes), when bilingual children reached

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higher proficiency in both languages. Considering each language’s characteristics is another way to resolve the conflicting findings. For example, Chen et al. (2008) investigated the phonological awareness of Cantonese-speaking children in first, second and fourth grade, who were learning Mandarin in an immersion programme at school. As children showed better performances on a task measuring onset awareness in Cantonese (a linguistic aspect more complex in Mandarin) and on tasks measuring rime and tone in Mandarin (linguistic aspects more complex in Cantonese), authors concluded that bilingual children’s phonological awareness was affected by the phonological structure of the languages they were exposed to. This result was also found in another study conducted by Bialystok with first-grade children who were Cantonese/English, Hebrew/ English or Spanish/English bilinguals (Bialystok et al., 2005a). Moreover, differences in children’s age at the time of evaluation could also explain the conflicting issues (Bruck & Genesee, 1995; Goldstein, 2001). For example, according to research cited by Bialystok et al. (2005b), studies typically report a bilingual advantage for 5-year-olds on phonological awareness, which disappears by the age of six when children begin reading instruction. With regard to the relationship between bilingualism and the other types of metalinguistic awareness, the majority of studies were interested in syntactic awareness. Just as with phonological awareness, these studies have led to contradictory findings. In a study conducted by Galambos and Goldin-Meadow (1990) among children aged 4– 8 years, the authors compared the ability to explain grammatical errors in several sentences of Spanish/English bilingual children (who were categorized as ‘intermediate’ or ‘proficient’ in both languages) with the one of their English or Spanish monolingual peers. Their results revealed that bilinguals were no more likely than monolinguals to give grammar-oriented explanations, showing no group differences at this syntactic task. But, in the same study, they also found that bilinguals were more able to detect and correct grammatical errors in sentences than monolinguals of the same age, showing the impact of the task used in these studies. This last result has recently been found by Davidson, Raschke and Pervez (2010) with bilingual children aged 5–6 years, speaking both Urdu and English at home, who outperformed their monolingual English peers at a detection task of grammatically incorrect sentences. Recently, Saur et al. (2009) reported contradictory findings with French/German adults who did not reach the proficiency levels of native speakers in both languages at a word-order syntactic awareness task, despite having early learnt French and German (before the age of 3). Like phonological awareness, considering age of acquisition of the L2 could also resolve the apparently conflicting findings. For example, in a transversal study, Johnson and Newport (1989) evaluated the impact of the age of acquisition of the L2 on syntactic and morphological awareness. They found that native Chinese or Korean speakers who acquired their L2 (English) before the age of seven reached native performance on their test, whereas subjects who acquired their L2 after that age showed a linear decline in performance up through puberty. They also revealed that basic word order (syntactic awareness) and present progressive in English (morpho-syntactic awareness) were acquired by all the bilinguals, regardless of their age of acquisition. However, late learners had greater difficulty with other aspects of English syntax and morphology, underlying the importance of the tasks used in the results’ interpretations. The relation between the two languages and the two writing systems is another important factor, which should be taken into account. Indeed, cross-linguistic transfer (i.e., applying knowledge from one language to another one) of metalinguistic awareness abilities is one of the suggested hypotheses that could explain the bilingual advantage (Kuo & Anderson, 2010). So,

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several authors postulate that more positive effects can be expected when the two languages share similar properties that can thus be transferred from one language to the other one. For example, Deacon, Wade-Woolley and Kirby (2007) showed evidence of cross-linguistic transfer among English children in first to third grade who were enrolled in a French immersion programme at school: French morphological awareness contributed to English reading and English morphological awareness contributed to French reading for these children. This bilingual advantage can be attributed to language proximity between French and English (Deacon, Wade-Wooley & Kirby, 2009). In the same way, similarities in syntactic structures in both languages would facilitate acquisitions, whereas differences (like in Chinese/English) would slow them down (Chan, 2004) and derivational morphological awareness would be less susceptible to transfer between languages than phonological awareness, especially when both languages do not share the same derivational rules (Saiegh-Haddad & Geva, 2008). These conclusions underline the importance of languages’ characteristics in the observation of a positive cross-linguistic transfer, which could explain the bilingual advantage in metalinguistic awareness. They also reveal that morphological awareness and syntactic awareness seem to be languagespecific skills. Thus, in this view, it seems essential to take languages’ similarities and dissimilarities into account because the more the two languages are similar in their structural components or in their writing systems, the more positive cross-linguistic transfer may appear (e.g., Chan, 2004; Kantola & Van Gompel, 2011; Pollard-Durodola & Simmons, 2009). Nevertheless, several studies also reported positive cross-linguistic transfer on linguistic aspects that are dissimilar in both languages or across different-script languages, leading us to moderate the claim about the importance of languages’ similarities. For example, Wang, Cheng and Chen (2006) observed a significant contribution of English morphological awareness to Chinese reading among Chinese children attending Elementary Grade 2 and 4 who were learning English in an immersion programme. In the same way, positive correlations were found for languages that were similar and dissimilar on phonological features and for languages that were either both alphabetical, or one alphabetical and one non-alphabetical. Among other results, strong cross-linguistic transfer was obtained between phonological awareness tasks in both bilinguals’ languages, be it in Spanish/English among first graders followed in second grade (Gottardo & Mueller, 2009), in Korean/English among first, second and third graders (Wang et al., 2006), in Chinese/English among first, second and third graders (Chen, Xu, Nguyen, Hong & Wang, 2010) or in Arabic/English in grades 3–6 (Saiegh-Haddad & Geva, 2008). Thus, authors usually agree that phonological awareness is a general mechanism, which is not language-specific (Gomez & Reason, 2002). Finally, Contradictory findings were observed in studies evaluating the transfer of the same morphological aspects (compounds) in the same languages (Chinese L1/English L2) among children approximately equivalent in age (1st, 2nd and 4th grade for Pasquarella, Chen, Lam, Luo & Ramirez, 2011; 2nd and 4th grade for Wang et al., 2006) and with normal English efficiency (total immersion programmes for both studies), thus raising some questions about the aforementioned factor of languages’ characteristics. According to Kuo and Anderson’s structural sensitivity theory (2010), the bilingual advantage in metalinguistic awareness may be explained by something ‘beyond cross-linguistic transfer’. Indeed, a simultaneous experience of two languages may enable bilingual children to better realize and understand both similarities and differences between these two languages. By comparing their first and second languages, close and distant metalinguistic features become more prominent, making the representations of language structure stand out on a more abstract level. And this latter point may better explain the bilingual advantage in

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metalinguistic awareness than the simple cross-linguistic transfer of only similar linguistic aspects. Finally, it is necessary to emphasize that most of the research conducted with bilingual children concerned phonological awareness, syntax and inflectional morphological awareness, but very few studies were interested in derivational morphological awareness in bilinguals. As Deacon et al. (2007) suggested, the use of derivational items in future studies is clearly required to extend the previous findings of bilingualism’s impact on metalinguistic awareness. This is precisely the aim of the present study.

Present study Most studies conducted with bilinguals were interested in evaluating the cross-linguistic transfer of metalinguistic and/or reading abilities (Deacon et al., 2007; Dickinson, McCabe, Clark-Chiarelli & Wolf, 2004; Wang et al., 2006). This is not the goal of the present article. The aim of the present study is to provide an investigation of young second-language learners’ skills in phonological, morphological and syntactic awareness by comparing a group of French children who are learning German (L2) in a partial immersion programme (i.e., SLL) and a group of French monolingual children of the same age. Derivational morphological awareness was our most important centre of interest because this ability was not much studied until recently, even less in a bilingual context. Moreover, authors usually use only one or two tasks to evaluate this complex ability. Thus, we chose to measure in details this competence with the help of four derivational morphological tasks. We also evaluated syntactic and phonological awareness to obtain a more complete profile of bilingualism. Our study focuses on French and German because of the interesting characteristics of these languages in phonological, morphological and syntactic dimensions. The phonological structure is not so different between French and German, whereas the morphological and syntactic structure of both languages differs in important ways. Indeed, German and French are both alphabetical languages composed of the same 26 letters of the alphabet (plus one graphic symbol in German: ß). Moreover, most of the phonemes of the two languages are shared (apart from very rare exceptions like, for example, the sound [j], which exists in French but not in German). Nevertheless, both languages sometimes employ different graphemes for the same phonemes. For example, the letter ‘v’ in German is pronounced like the sound [f] in French (e.g., Verarbeitung/ finition – finishing) and it is the letter ‘w’ in German which is pronounced like the sound [v] in French (e.g., wachsam/vigilant – vigilant). Moreover, syllabic complexity as well as spelling-to-sound consistency is different between the two languages. Indeed, French is considered to have a simple syllabic structure, while German has a complex one (Seymour, Aro & Erskine, 2003) but French has a deeper orthography (36 phonemes for 130 graphemes) than German, which is considered as a shallow orthography with high consistency in the relationship between letters and sounds (40 phonemes for only 85 graphemes). Regarding derivational morphological awareness, French and German share one aspect: affixes. Both languages frequently use prefixes and suffixes to create new words. By contrast, these two languages differ largely from each other on compounds derivational morphological rules and syntactic rules. Indeed, German is an agglutinative language, which means that German very frequently combines several words to create new compounds. There are French compounds too, but these compounds are not as much frequent and not constructed the same way. In French, compounds are usually made of two words (e.g., poisson-chat, catfish), while in German, compounds consist of

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three or more words (e.g., Oberlokomotivfahrerswitwe – railroad engineer’s widow). Concerning syntactic awareness, word order is generally different in the two languages. For example, French sentences follow a subject–verb–object order, whatever the verb tense (e.g., Le garcon joue avec le chat; Le garcon a joue´avec le chat/ The boy plays with the cat; The boy played with the cat). In German, when the sentence is in a past tense compound, the past participle will be placed at the end of the sentence (e.g., Der Junge hat mit der Katze gespielt/ The boy played with the cat). Moreover, in German, word order can be changed according to the fact that should be highlighted in the sentence (e.g., Anna geht zum Meer; Zum Meer geht Anna/ Anna goes to the seaside), which is not the case in French. The children in this study began acquiring their L2 (German) in kindergarten, within a partial immersion programme at school. This means they began their L2 acquisition early, but cannot be considered as ‘full’ bilinguals. Our study allows us to investigate whether the early L2 learning has a positive effect, even if the children present a low proficiency level in their L2. The aim of this study was to provide an investigation of young SLL’s skills in phonological, morphological, and syntactic awareness. Based on the importance of the languages’ characteristics, we expected to find an advantage in compounds morphological and syntactic awareness but not in affixes morphological and phonological awareness for young SLL who attended first grade within the context of a partial immersion programme. Indeed, we expected that L2 exposure would facilitate the emergence of compounds morphological awareness and syntactic awareness because children have to compare these structural features that are dissimilar in both of their languages. And because of their more developed analytic attitude, they would consequently better understand their rules (see Kuo & Anderson’s structural sensitivity theory, 2010). We did not expect affixes morphological awareness and phonological awareness differences between the two groups because these linguistic aspects are very similar and shared in French and German. Thus, SLL children may not pay as much attention on these linguistic aspects because the comparison of these structural features of language may be less useful for them than the one of compounds and syntactic structures.

Method Participants Ninety-five first-grade children participated in our study. French was the first language learned by all children and was the language spoken at home. Forty-three of them were French children who had been attending a German partial immersion programme since their second year of kindergarten (i.e., from age four). In partial immersion programme, equal class time is allocated to each language: half the teaching time is in French (L1) and half in German (L2). Two teachers share the teaching, one giving lessons in French, the other in German. At the beginning of elementary school, children usually show poor German abilities (especially in verbal production), but by the end of elementary school, they are expected to be relatively proficient in speaking and reading in both their native language and their L2. In our study, children in first grade already showed good German verbal comprehension (assessed by our adapted German version of the Peabody), but were not able to translate French words or sentences into German (Table 1). It is worth underlining that their better performances in German receptive vocabulary compared with the adapted French version of Peabody were due to the items that were used: in

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Table 1. Number, age, non-verbal intelligence, receptive vocabulary and translation abilities in French and German for bilinguals and monolinguals Second-language learners Number Mean age (y;m) Range (y;m) Non-verbal intelligence (Progressive Matrices on 36) French receptive vocabulary (Peabody adaptation on 14) German receptive vocabulary (Peabody adaptation on 14) Word translation from French to German (on 5) Sentences translation from French to German (on 5)

43 6;7 6;2–7;2 25.07 (4.47) 9.98 (2.35) 11.3 (1.5) 1.7 (0.9) 0.3 (0.7)

Monolinguals 52 6;8 6;2–7;3 23.31 (5.28) 9.33 (2.71)

p ns ns ns

German version, only concrete and highly frequent nouns were used, while French version employed nouns, verbs and adjectives. These children were compared with 52 French monolingual children belonging to the same school. The two groups were matched for non-verbal abilities assessed by Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices (Raven, Raven & Court, 1998) and matched for verbal abilities assessed by an adaptation of the French version of the Peabody test (EVIP, Dunn, The´riault-Wahlen & Dunn, 1993). Children were predominately from middle-class homes. A questionnaire addressed to parents ensured that monolinguals did not speak any other language at home than French and that there were neither socio-economical differences between the two groups, nor differences in familial reading practices (number of books owned by children or story-reading frequency by parents). This questionnaire also revealed that almost none of the children attending the immersion programme had one parent whose native language was German and that children did not speak German at home. Most of the parents indicated having put their children’s name down for this school programme because they lived in a region situated in the Germany’s border and thought it would be helpful for their children’s future studies and/or jobs. No child had any history or current symptoms of developmental impairment, speech or language difficulties, behavioural and/or emotional disorders. Table 1 summarizes the main features of the two groups.

Measures Phonological awareness Phonological awareness was assessed with a French standardized phonological test (Test des Habilete´s Phonologiques, Ecalle, 2007) comprising two tasks with 12 experimental items each. The two tasks were a categorization task on the one hand and a deletion task on the other hand. These tasks involved two levels of speech processing: syllable and phoneme. Scoring at the two tasks was based upon the percentage of correct answers. One point was attributed for each correct answer.

Phonological categorization task. Children were shown four pictures for each of the 12 items. They were requested to select the two pictures whose names contained one common phonological unit at the beginning or at the end of the words. In half of the 12

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items, children had to categorize on the basis of common syllable (e.g., toupie-balairequin-bateau: top-broom-boat-shark), and for the other half, they had to categorize on the basis of common phoneme (e.g., singe-vache-sel-pomme: ape-cow-salt-apple).

Phonological deletion task. Children were shown 12 sets of five pictures each. For each set, the experimenter named the pictures. Children had to choose the picture that corresponded to the word said by the experimenter after having deleted its initial or final phonological unit. For six of the 12 sets, a syllable had to be deleted (e.g., cafe´: dragon-tasse-fe´e-buffet / coffee: dragon-cup-fairy-sideboard), and for the six others, a phoneme had to be deleted (e.g., bois: branche-oie-toit-clown / wood: branch-goose-roofclown).

Morphological awareness Morphological awareness was assessed through four tasks designed to measure children’s knowledge of derivational words and compound words. The word frequency was controlled using the French database Manulex (Le´te´, Sprenger-Charolles & Cole´, 2004). Scoring for all tasks was based upon the percentage of correct answers. One point was attributed for each correct answer.

Base extraction task. In this task, children were asked to extract the base of 16 affixed items said previously by the experimenter. All items were pseudo-words, which did not exist in French (e.g., tassette/cupette, de´garer/unpark). Children had to delete the affix before pronouncing the base. In half of the cases, extraction required a suffix deletion (e.g., tassette ? tasse – cupette ? cup). In the other half, extraction involved a prefix deletion (e.g., de´garer ? garer – unpark ? park). This task showed good internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .99 in first grade.

Derived-word production task. In this task, children were asked to end 16 sentences by giving an affixed form of the root of a pseudo-word (Kuo & Anderson, 2006). The sentences had a definition form. To ensure that the results were not dependent on vocabulary size, all items to produce were pseudo-words. Half of the items were suffixed forms (e.g., une petite rusine, c’est une… rusinette / a small rusine is a …), half were prefixed forms (e.g., prater encore une fois, c’est ? reprater/ to ‘prat’ one more time is …). This task showed good internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .85 in first grade.

Compounds production task. This task was designed to test how well children could use their knowledge about morphological structure to produce a neologism. In this task, children had to produce six neologisms by assembling two items from the definition presented previously. Half of the neologisms were verb–noun compounds (e.g., comment peut-on appeler quelque chose qui sert a` chasser la poussie`re ? chassepoussie`re/What would you call something that is used to remove dust? dust-remover) and the other half were noun–noun compounds (e.g., comment peut-on appeler un lion qui ressemble a`un singe ? Un lion-singe/What would you call a lion who looks like a monkey?

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A monkey-lion). This task showed good internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .79 in first grade.

Compounds explanation task. This task was designed to evaluate how well children could use their knowledge about morphological structure to explain a real compound word. Children were asked to explain six compound words pronounced successively by the experimenter. Three items were verb–noun compounds (e.g., pourquoi le se`checheveux s’appelle-t-il comme cela? – why is the hairdryer called that?), and the three others were noun–noun compounds (e.g., pourquoi le chien-loup s’appelle-t-il comme cela? - why is the wolfhound called that?). Three of the six items were also compound words translated similarly in German (tire-bouchon/Korkenziehrer – corkscrew; chienloup/Wolfshund – Wolfhound; portemanteau/Kleidersta¨nder – coat rack) but the other three were not compound words in German (se`che-cheveux/Fo¨n – Hairdryer; balaibrosse/Schrubber – scrubbing brush; poisson-chat/Wels – catfish). This task showed good internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .59 in first grade.

Syntactic awareness Grammatical correction of asemantic and agrammatical sentences. This task was used to assess syntactic awareness. Children were requested to correct the agrammaticality of 12 asemantic and agrammatical sentences without correcting the semantic anomaly. More precisely, they had to correct sentences with an anomaly in word order (e.g., Adrien sur sa s’assoit teˆte ? Adrien s’assoit sur sa teˆte/Adrien on his sits head ? Adrien sits on his head). Resorting to asementical sentences lead to a sharper analysis of syntactic awareness: without meaning, children have no other choice to use syntactic clues to provide the good answers. Children were told to keep all the words used, even if the sentence was meaningless at the end. They scored one point if they corrected the grammar error without correcting the meaning mistake but zero point if they corrected the word order and also the meaning error (e.g., Adrien s’assoit sur sa chaise – Adrien sits on his seat). This task showed good internal consistency with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .71 in first grade.

Procedure With the exception of standardized phonological tests, each task was administered individually in a quiet room at the children’s school and required an oral answer. For each task, two practice items with corrective feedback were presented before experimental items without further feedback. Given the great number of tasks, testing was divided into two sessions to encourage optimal performances on all tasks. Each session lasted about 40 min on two separate days to avoid tiredness.

Results Development of different metalinguistic awareness The purpose of the study was to compare the second-language learners’ metalinguistic abilities with those of monolingual children. To analyse the linguistic manipulations within our different tasks, the item’s type was entered as within-subject factor in

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Table 2. Mean (standard deviations) and range for correct scores on metalinguistic tasks in percentage Second-language learners Metalinguistic tasks 1. Phonological categorization (total) a. Syllable b. Phoneme 2. Phonological deletion (total) a. Syllable b. Phoneme 3. Base extraction (total) a. Prefixes b. Suffixes 4. Derived-word production (total) a. Prefixes b. Suffixes 5. Compounds production (total) a. Verb–noun b. Noun–noun 6. Compounds explanation (total) a. Verb–noun b. Noun–noun 7. Grammatical correction

Monolinguals

M (SD)

Range

M (SD)

Range

65.3 (21.4) 74.8 (25.6) 55.8 (26.7) 81.0 (20.0) 79.8 (24.8) 82.2 (19.4) 67.0 (24.0) 65.4 (34.2) 68.6 (25.8) 30.8 (24.8) 17.2 (25.2) 44.5 (31.9) 71.3 (25.5) 48.1 (41.3) 94.6 (21.7) 64.1 (20.3) 87.6 (21.9) 40.7 (29.6) 43.2 (20.5)

16.7–100.0 16.7–100.0 0.0–100.0 41.7–100.0 16.7–100.0 33.3–100.0 6.3–100.0 0.0–100.0 12.5–100.0 0.0–93.8 0.0–87.5 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 16.7–100.0 33.3–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–83.3

59.6 (25.3) 69.6 (30.2) 49.7 (28.7) 72.6 (23.3) 75.3 (26.3) 69.9 (25.8) 57.1 (26.9) 50.4 (35.7) 63.8 (30.9) 28.1 (22.1) 19.71 (22.1) 36.4 (29.7) 53.5 (30.4) 30.1 (38.8) 76.9 (38.8) 43.9 (23.9) 67.3 (28.4) 20.5 (29.4) 27.9 (18.2)

8.3–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 16.7–100.0 0.0–100.0 16.7–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–93.8 0.0–87.5 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–100.0 0.0–75.0

subsequent inferential analyses. Accordingly, several analyses of variance using group and item type as factors were performed on the mean scores of each set of measurements. As normality variables were obtained, we did not check for possible outliers in the data and thus did not make any cleaning procedure of our data before analysing group differences. Table 2 shows the means, standard deviations and ranges for phonological, morphological and syntactic awareness measures.

Phonological awareness Prior to entering the data in the statistical analyses, we checked that the responses obtained in the phonological awareness tasks were significantly different from chance. The performances of the two groups on both phonological tasks were significantly different from the random effect (p = .001).

Categorization task. The ANOVA showed only a significant effect of item type (F (1,93) = 39.51, p = .001, g2 = .30), without any significant effect of group (F (1,93) = 1,36, p = .25) or interaction (F(1,93) < 1). All children performed better at finding the two words containing the same syllable than the same phoneme (72.2% vs. 52.8%, respectively). Deletion task. The ANOVA showed no significant effect of group (F(1,93) = 3.48, p = .06, g2 = .04), of item type (F(1,93) < 1) and of interaction (F(1,93) = 3.04, p = .08). SLL had a tendency to show better performances on the deletion task than their

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monolingual peers (65.3% vs. 59.6%, difference = 5.7%) but this difference was only almost significant (p = .06) with a very small size effect (g2 = .04).

Morphological awareness Base extraction task. The ANOVA showed only a significant effect of item type (F (1,93) = 4.47, p = .03, g2 = .05) without any significant effect of group (F(1,93) = 3.51, p = .06, g2 = .04) or interaction (F(1,93) = 1.70, p = .19). All children performed a little better at extracting the base when the extraction involved a suffix deletion than when it required a prefix deletion (66.2% vs. 57.9%, respectively). SLL had a tendency to show better performances on the base extraction task than their monolingual peers (67.0% vs. 57.1%, respectively, difference = 9.9%) but this difference was only almost significant (p = .06) with a very small size effect (g2 = .04).

Derived-word production task. The ANOVA revealed a significant effect of the item type (F(1,93) = 56.37, p = .001, g2 = .38). The effect of group (F(1,93) < 1) and the interaction failed to reach significance (F(1,93) = 3.28, p = .07, g2 = .03). In both groups, children performed significantly better when the production required a suffix addition rather than a prefix addition (40.5% vs. 18.5%, respectively). Both groups obtained equal performances at the production of a prefixed word (SLL: 17.2% vs. monolinguals: 19.7%; difference = 2.5%) but the SLL group had a tendency to outperform their monolingual peers at the production of a suffixed word (44.5% vs. 36.4%, respectively; difference = 8.1%) but the interaction was only significant as a trend (p = .07) and with a very small size effect (g2 = .03).

Compounds production task. The ANOVA yielded a significant main effect of group (F (1,93) = 9.31, p = .003, g2 = .09) and item type (F(1,93) = 98.97, p = .001, g2 = .52) but no significant interaction (F(1,93) < 1). SLL performed better on the compounds production task than monolingual children (71.3% vs. 53.5%, respectively, difference = 17.8%). Children scored higher when the neologism was a noun–noun (e.g., monkey-lion) and lower when the neologism was a verb–noun (e.g., dust-remover) (85.8% and 39.1%, respectively).

Compounds explanation task. The ANOVA showed a significant effect of group (F(1, 93) = 19.34, p = .001, g2 = .17) and of the item type (F(1, 93) = 193.9, p = .001, g2 = .68) but no significant interaction (F(1, 93) < 1). The SLL outperformed the monolingual children at explaining compounds (64.1% vs. 43.9%, respectively, difference = 20.2%). All children were more accurate when explaining a verb–noun compound (e.g., hairdryer) than a noun–noun compound (e.g., wolfhound) (77.5% vs. 30.6%, respectively).

Syntactic awareness Grammatical correction of asemantic and agrammatical sentences. The analysis yielded a significant effect of group (F(1,93) = 14,90, p = .001, g2 = .14). The SLL were

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significantly better than monolingual children at correcting agrammaticality of asemantic and agrammatical sentences (43.2% vs. 27.9%, respectively, difference = 15.3%).

Discussion The aim of this study was to provide an investigation of young second-language learners’ skills in phonological, morphological and syntactic awareness. More precisely, we aimed at determining whether there was an advantage for children acquiring an L2 on these three tests of metalinguistic awareness as compared with monolinguals. Based on previous findings highlighting that the advantage depends on the similarities and differences across languages (Bialystok et al., 2005a; Chen et al., 2008), we expected that SLL would outperform their monolingual peers on compounds morphological and syntactic tasks but not on derivational morphological and phonological tasks. To test our hypotheses, ninety-five first-grade children participated in this study. They were divided into two groups. The first group was made up of French SLL placed since kindergarten within a context of German partial immersion programme. The second group constituted by French monolinguals was matched to the first one for age and for verbal and non-verbal abilities. Several tasks were selected to assess children’s metalinguistic awareness (phonological, derivational morphological and syntactic awareness). As we hypothesized and congruent with previous findings (Bialystok et al., 2005a; Goldstein et al., 2005), no clear privileged development of phonological awareness was found in our study. The children in both groups obtained equal performances on tasks requiring them to categorize syllables and phonemes, and SLL children only showed a nonsignificant tendency to better delete phonological units compared with their monolingual peers. This pattern of results could be related to the fact that French and German are not fundamentally different on the phonological structure. Thus, SLL may not need to deeply analyse and compare this linguistic aspect, which is similar in both languages. In other words, they may not pay more particular attention to syllables and phonemes than monolingual children, resulting in the absence of a bilingual advantage on phonological awareness. Nevertheless, this pattern of results could also be related to the fact that reading instruction was already taking place in French for both groups (Bialystok et al., 2005b). As all children who participated in the study were evaluated after five months of reading instruction, it is likely that both groups were already able to analyse the phonological structure and know grapheme–phoneme correspondences rules (e.g., Goswami et al., 2005). Thanks to this phonological work and training, necessary when learning to read, both groups may pay similar attention to the phonological features of language also explaining the absence of a bilingual phonological advantage. A future study, taking place in the end of kindergarten, should be conducted among our German SLL and monolingual children to see whether a bilingual phonological advantage is – or not – present before the reading instruction takes place. Concerning morphological and syntactic awareness, our results vary according to the linguistic aspect under consideration. If SLL only had a non-significant tendency to better manipulate affixes (extraction and production tasks), they showed an important advantage on compounds morphological awareness tasks as well as on syntactic awareness task. Indeed, on the one hand, both groups performed similarly when they had to produce a derived word by adding an affix or when they had to extract the base of a derived word by deleting an affix. On the other hand, SLL performed better than their

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monolingual peers at tasks requiring them to produce or to explain compound neologisms, as well as at tasks requiring them to correct agrammatical and asemantic sentences. This last result contradicts the findings of Saur et al. (2009), where bilinguals did not achieve as good performances as those of monolinguals on a syntactic word-order task in both of their languages. It is worth noting that differences observed in morphological and syntactic awareness tasks in this study cannot be attributed to differences in vocabulary, because monolingual and SLL children did not differ significantly in verbal abilities. It therefore follows that L2 acquisition in a partial immersion programme facilitates progression through the early levels of compounds morphological awareness and syntactic awareness. The comparison made across languages by the SLL causes them to notice that German is an agglutination language and performs with different syntactic rules than French. This exposure to numerous and frequent compounds in German and to different syntactic rules in German sentences could explain the SLL’s better performances at the morphological and syntactic tasks used in this study. Congruent with previous findings (Bialystok et al., 2005a; Chen et al., 2008), the whole pattern of results reflects the influence of languages’ characteristics on the bilingual advantage in metalinguistic awareness. But if previous studies have suggested that a bilingual advantage was more susceptible to appear on shared linguistic dimensions because of the possibility of cross-linguistic transfer, SLL children in our study rather showed better performances on linguistic aspects that are dissimilar in French and German. Indeed, SLL children showed a clear bilingual advantage on compounds morphological and syntactic tasks (i.e., linguistic aspects that are different in French and German) and only a slight tendentious superiority on affixes morphological tasks (i.e., similar linguistic aspect in both languages). The recent structural sensitivity theory of Kuo and Anderson (2010) appears very relevant in the interpretation of our results. The authors postulate that a simultaneous experience of two languages enables the bilinguals to better develop their metalinguistic awareness thanks to the comparisons they make between their two languages. Based on the structural sensitivity theory, we hypothesized that French children attending a German partial immersion programme are likely to compare their two languages. As compounds and syntax largely differ in both languages, they may need to pay a deeper attention to these formal features of languages to better understand their differences. This more analytic attitude leads them to a better understanding of the languages’ compounds morphological and syntactic rules. Conscious attention to morphological and syntactic features may thus appear sooner among SLL than monolingual children. Thereby, learning German morphological and syntactic rules allows children to develop a greater sensitivity for morphological and syntactic dimensions in French and helps them to apply morphological and syntactic rules in their first language. Finally, it is worth remembering that the children in our study were not full bilinguals. They only began learning their L2 in kindergarten and they were still at a low level of proficiency in German at the time of our study. The fact that SLL outperformed their monolingual peers is congruent with Cromdal’s hypothesis of a relative threshold of proficiency (Cromdal, 1999). Children benefit from early L2 learning, even if they are not equally proficient in both languages or show a low proficiency in their L2. We can therefore conclude that L2 acquisition in a partial immersion programme promotes the early level in morphological and syntactic awareness. Finally, several educational implications could be proposed. For example, it is worthwhile to encourage teachers of the immersion programme to submit child at identical exercises on formal aspects in both

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languages. This way, it could make the cross-linguistic comparisons that SLL children are likely to realize even more easier, encourage the recognition of similar and dissimilar linguistic aspects and thus favour the emergence of a more analytic attitude towards the structural features of languages.

Conclusion The results of this study add to the growing body of the literature, which shows that young SLL outperform monolinguals on some measures of metalinguistic awareness (Bialystok et al., 2005a,b). Early learning of a L2 within partial immersion programme promotes the level of morphological and syntactic awareness. This is due to the fact that learning a new language requires specific attention to the formal features of the two languages in use. However, these differences have only been observed on those dimensions that differ between the two languages (French and German in this study), thereby showing the importance of the languages’ characteristics. Further studies aiming at comparing other combinations of languages, varying in their degree of proximity, are needed to better understand the role of the languages’ characteristics notably on derivational morphological awareness. This research could also evaluate the way proximity between the two languages influences the cross-linguistic transfer of metalinguistic awareness (Deacon et al., 2007). Furthermore, a large corpus of empirical data documents the crucial impact of morphological awareness for word-decoding development as well as for reading comprehension (Baayen, Feldman & Schreuder, 2006; Carlisle, 2003; Casalis, Dusautoir, Cole´ & Ducrot, 2009; Casalis & Louis-Alexandre, 2000; Marec-Breton, Gombert & Cole´, 2005). Then, the longitudinal evaluation of both groups during the elementary school years on morphological awareness and reading abilities will allow us to examine whether or not the bilingual advantage in morphological awareness facilitates or not the secondlanguage learners’ reading learning.

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Second-language learners' advantage in metalinguistic awareness: a question of languages' characteristics.

The awareness of the formal structure of language has been widely studied in the literature but less in a bilingualism context. Even less with second-...
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