The Development of Cognate Awareness in Child Second/Third Language Learners of French in French Immersion: The Effects of Orthographic Overlap and Cognate Status

Purpose: Our 1-year longitudinal study tracked the development of cognate awareness among second (L2) and third language (L3) learners of French in French immersion in Grades 1 and 2 to explore the impact of orthographic overlap and cognate status (true vs. false) on children's ability to recog...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of speech, language, and hearing research language, and hearing research, 2021-11, Vol.64 (11), p.4390-4402
Main Authors: Hipfner-Boucher, Kathleen, Pasquarella, Adrian, Prasad, Sonal, Chen, Xi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Child
Child development
Child Language
Children & youth
Cognates
Educational aspects
Elementary School Students
French
French as a second language
French language
Grade 1
Grade 2
Grade 4
Humans
Immersion
Immersion Programs
Intelligence Tests
Language
Language instruction
Linguistics
Longitudinal Studies
Multilingualism
Native language acquisition
Orthographic Symbols
Orthography
Phonology
Primary Education
Reading Comprehension
Second Language Learning
Semantics
Spelling
Study and teaching
Third language learning
Verbal Ability
Vocabulary
Vocabulary Development
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Summary:Purpose: Our 1-year longitudinal study tracked the development of cognate awareness among second (L2) and third language (L3) learners of French in French immersion in Grades 1 and 2 to explore the impact of orthographic overlap and cognate status (true vs. false) on children's ability to recognize cognate relationships. We also assessed the impact of French L2/L3 status on performance. Method: We compared performance on three conditions (true cognates with same and similar spellings, false cognates with same spellings) within and across grades. We used a direct measure of cognate awareness that required children (n = 81) to distinguish true from false cognates presented orally and in print. Results: Overall, Grade 1 children failed to recognize cognate relationships between true cognates with similar spellings, but successfully recognized true cognates with same spellings. Performance on all conditions increased significantly between Grades 1 and 2. The greatest improvement was seen on true cognates with similar spellings. Performance on false cognates was inferior to performance on true cognates with same spellings in Grade 1, and inferior to performance on both same and similar spelled true cognates in Grade 2. No differences were found due to L2/L3 status. Conclusions: Among sequential learners of L2/L3 French in the early stages of additional language learning, cognate awareness is impacted by the degree of orthographic overlap, as well as by cognate status. Children's ability to recognize cross-language orthographic and semantic relationships improves substantially across the early elementary grades.
ISSN:1092-4388
1558-9102
DOI:10.1044/2021_JSLHR-20-00645