Question to the community

[Catherine Kawahata]

Hi!

I'm not sure if this is the study Katie is referring to, but I think it
addresses the same questions and documents the crossover effect in this
particular population of children:

Kohnert, K. J., Bates, E., & Hernandez, A. E. (1999). Balancing
bilinguals:  Lexical semantic production and cognitive processing in
children learning Spanish and English. Journal of Speech, Language, and
Hearing Research, 42, 1400-1413.

Katie, I wonder if you remember which language pairs your students looked
at.  Also Spanish-English?  I'd be interested in hearing more.

I've lost the beginning of this thread, but to the person who asked the
original question (Ellina?), do you think the literature on bilingual
digit span would be helpful?  I've lent out my copy of the following
article, but if memory serves me, it might relate to your question of
establishing dominance.

Chincotta, D., & Underwood, G. (1998). Non temporal determinants of
bilingual memory capacity:  The role of long-term representations and
fluency. Bilingualism:  Language and Cognition, 1(2), 117-130.

I'm not that familiar with this type of work, but hope it helps.

Good luck!

Cathy

Catherine Kawahata
University of Hawai'i at Manoa
Department of Linguistics
1890 East-West Rd., Moore 569
Honolulu, Hawaii 96822


On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Alcock, Katie wrote:

> Some slightly more objective work than the anecdotes suggested here (sorry,
> I just have a hard time with the idea of asking someone to lose a language!)
> has been done by Kathy Kohnert, particularly looking at naming skill and
> speed as children who started schooling with one language go through school.
> I can't recall the exact reference but I think it's in Brain and Language.
>
> In summary if you start school at about 6 then you become equal in home and
> school languages at about 8 and then cross over at 10 to become dominant in
> school language.
>
> Two of my undergraduates have replicated this - one only in 9 year olds
> (they were English dominant or equal in the two languages, and ones who were
> equal in the two knew more names of objects - if allowed to name in either
> language - than English monolinguals, if I recall correctly).  The other
> looked at development and roughly replicated Kathy's findings.
>
> Her paper may be under Kohnert-Rice.
>
> Katie
>