幼兒外語學習者對字的認知能力

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(1)Keywords： Word awareness, metalinguistic awareness, cognitive control of processing, foreign language children, bilingual preschool children, foreign language acquisition, Taiwan. 幼兒外語學習者對字的認知能力 (NSC: 90-2411-H006-013) Hui-Tzu Min (閔慧慈) National Cheng Kung University The purpose of the second-year experiment is to check if the bilingual advantage can last to the second year without being set off by the age effect. Specifically, it intends to examine whether the significant difference noted in the first year (i.e., name manipulation) between the two groups can still be found in the same word awareness tasks during the second year. In addition, it aims to investigate the age effect within both groups. The results show that during the second year, the two groups still differed significantly in name manipulation as did in the first year. Again same with the first year, there was no significant difference between the two groups on overall word size judgment. However, the bilingual group significantly outperformed their monolingual counterparts in word count (a new test in word segmentation) and incongruous word size judgments. In other words, in addition to superior awareness of the arbitrary relationship between word and its referent in name manipulation found in the first year, there were two more significant differences noted during the second year— word count and name exchange. The findings suggest that generally bilingual advantage observed during the first year lasted through the second year. With regard to the age effect on children’s development of word awareness, both groups’ performance during the second year all improved with age, although some of the progress did not reach statistical significance. The results of the second-year experiments have three important bearings. First, the bilingual advantage found in name manipulation during the first year did not attenuate with time. In other words, the bilingual children still significantly outperformed their monolingual counterparts on this task. Second, more beneficial effects emerged during the second year. Apart from the superior recognition of the divisible relationship between words and their referents, the bilingual children were more advanced than the monolingual children in counting words and real word name exchange (Puppy for TiouTiou). These significant differences demonstrate that the.

(2) bilingual children were more sophisticated in their comprehension of word as a unit and of the arbitrary relationship between objects and their phonological realizations. Third, there was a developmental pattern found among the monolingual children between the first and second years. Compared to themselves a year ago, the monolingual children were more mature in all aspects of word awareness. They tended to analyze aberrant word strings more along the morphosyllabic than the semantic line. They were more able to distinguish word size from object size, albeit such ability was easily influenced by increasing task difficulty. They were more willing to consent to replacing a nonword name TiouTiou with Puppy for the bumblebee, but showed indecisiveness as to whether other physical attributes should also be changed accordingly. Although such an irresolute attitude indicates merely a hazy idea of word, it is already an apparent improvement on the false realization of the inseparable relationship between words and their referents a year ago. In brief, the monolingual children possessed a rudimentary form of word awareness during the second year. However, this emerging awareness fluctuated in accordance with task difficulty. With regard to the bilingual children, there was also a developmental pattern between the first and second years. They were relatively more advanced in all aspects of word awareness, especially in judging word size. Their steady improvement on the three tasks during the second year demonstrate their more sophisticated awareness about word, which was less affected by the increasing task difficulty. Unlike Yelland et al’s (1993) finding that the bilingual benefits “had eroded by the time the children were roughly 6 years old (approximately one year after the positive effects of bilingualism had been reported), the second-year experiments found that the beneficial bilingual effects extended to the second year. Before attempting any interpretation, there are two important differences between these two studies that need to be addressed. First, in Yelland et al.’s study, the monolingual and bilingual grade 1 children received literacy instruction, but the monolingual and bilingual children did not receive any literacy instruction in this study, albeit they were constantly read to by their respective homeroom teachers. It is perhaps the effect of literacy that offset the bilingualism effect in Yelland et al.’s study. Second, the language learning environments in both studies are quite different. The bilingual children in Yelland et al.’s study attended a mainstream traditional program in which majority language children were instructed in their first language (English) and exposed to a foreign language (Italian) as a curriculum subject. No description of how much Italian the children used to converse with one another was provided. It is the researcher’s assumption that the bilingual children did not use much Italian outside of classroom contexts given the limited language currency in eastern.

(3) Melbourne in Australia. By contrast, the bilingual children in the current study attended a program that could be deemed as a combination of mainstream traditional program and immersion program. The principle’s vision was to create an ideal language-learning environment in which English obtained most of the resources and time inside the school, given the primary currency placed on English in the society. Prompted by this drive, the children as well as the teachers were encouraged to use English as much as possible; even it means inserting an English vocabulary item in an otherwise Mandarin utterance. Whenever the researcher was there to observe or test the children, she would always hear the homeroom teacher using code-switched utterances to instruct the children, such as “JULIA, nide CUP ne?” (Julia, where is your cup?) or “Pingguoban, xianzai dao waimian qu LINE UP!” (Apple class, now go outside to line up). With the concerted effort of English teachers and homeroom teachers, the bilingual kindergarten under focus was replete with code-switched utterances and the children, immersed in this environment, gradually developed a tendency for juxtaposing English and Mandarin. This tendency to use two languages might increase the bilingual children’s second language competence and thus modify the process of metalinguistic development in the preschool period in comparison to the development of these processes in the monolingual children. This is probably why the bilingual children in the present study could still outperform their monolingual counterparts on word awareness tasks during the second year. On the other hand, without superiority in motivation and a facilitative foreign language-learning environment, it is not surprising that the bilingual children’s performance on word size judgment was caught up by their literate monolingual counterparts a year later in Yelland et al.’s study. Although many studies (Bialystok, 1987; Diaz, 1985; Hakuta, 1987; Yelland et al., 1993), including the current study, show that limited exposure to a second language would suffice to foster some aspects of word awareness, opinions divided on the duration of these beneficial bilingual effects. Diaz and Klingler (1991), drawing on Diaz’s (1985) and Hakuta’s (1987) studies on literate bilingual children in transitional bilingual-education programs, hypothesized that the effects of bilingualism occur more strongly at the beginning stages of second-language learning but attenuate as children become more proficient bilinguals. In a similar vein, Yelland et al. (1993) reported the short life of such duration (approximately one year two months). The findings of the present study, however, did not sit well with either hypothesis or study due to the bilingual group’s continual superior performance over that of the monolingual group during the second year. The major differences between those studies and the current one again lie in the literacy effect and the second language-learning environment. The children in Yelland et al.’s (1993),.

(4) Diaz’s (1985) and Hakuta’s (1987) studies were all literate to some extent, whereas the preschool children in the present study did not receive any literate education. The literacy effect might help the monolingual children in those studies catch up with their bilingual counterparts in performing metalinguistic tasks. By contrast, the monolingual children in the current study, without the assistance of literacy, still lagged behind the bilingual group a year later, albeit they made some progress. Second, the language-learning contexts in which the bilingual children studied in Yelland et al.’s research were not as facilitative as that in the current study, thus failing to help those literate bilingual children improve their second language proficiency efficiently. The bilingual programs attended by those literate children in previous studies were either a mainstream traditional program (e.g., Yelland et al., 1993) or a transitional bilingual-education program. Students might rarely use the second/foreign language outside of the classroom, thus their second language competence accrued slowly. The effect of a slow increase in the bilingual students’ second language competency might not be as strong as the literacy effect on the monolingual children, resulting in the attenuation of positive bilingual effect as the bilingual children grew older. On the contrary, the preschool children in this study attended a quasi-immersion language program in which teachers in and out of class actively used the language. Being constantly exposed to the foreign language both in the classroom and on the playground, the preschool children’s foreign language proficiency in this study might improve steadily with time. With a steady improvement on foreign language competence and no literacy instruction to counteract its effect, the bilingual children could still maintain their bilingual superiority over their monolingual counterparts in this study. The first-year study lends support to both Bialystok’s (1987) findings and Diaz and Klinger’s (1991) level of bilingualism hypothesis that exposure to rather than competence in a second/foreign language may be the decisive factor for the acquisition of a metalinguistic benefit. However, the second-year study does not support the second proposition of Diaz and Klinger’s level of bilingualism hypothesis that initially observed beneficial bilingual effects attenuate as children become more proficient bilinguals. In fact, the positive effects still manifested themselves in word count, incongruous pairs, and name/attribute manipulation as the bilingual preschool children continued develop both their languages in an additive bilingual environment. The second-year findings lend support to Cummins’s (1978) argument that the metalinguistic benefits of learning a second language will accumulate if bilingual children continue developing both their languages. Although this study found that the beneficial bilingual effect on word awareness could extend to the second year, the findings can only be applied to preschool children who do not receive any literacy.

(5) education and who attend a bilingual program that approximates an immersion program. The findings do not predict a positive bilingual effect on other aspects of metalinguistic awareness or during the third year when formal literacy education begins..

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