About this srcd poster session

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Panel information
Panel 11. Language, Communication

Abstract

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Bilingual preschoolers—who acquire a heritage language at home and a societal language predominantly in the broader community—face the challenge of developing two languages in the same time span that their monolingual peers acquire just one. These time constraints may make bilinguals more susceptible to experience cross-linguistic influences during their language development. Positive transfer, where knowledge in one language supports growth in the other, may occur through shared semantic or syntactic structures. Whereas interference, where differences between the two languages hinder the development, arises from divergent semantic or syntactic features. Cross-linguistic transfer and interference may be further moderated by individual cognitive capacities, such as verbal memory. However, while verbal memory has been linked to successful bilingual development, its role in facilitating transfer or mitigating interference remains uncertain. This study investigates whether development in one language is influenced by transfer and/or interference effects from the other language. Furthermore, we examine whether these effects are moderated by verbal memory abilities, expecting stronger verbal memory to facilitate transfer and weaker verbal memory to increase susceptibility to interference.
The study followed 254 bilingual preschoolers across three measurement time points (Age at T1: M = 48.37 months, SD = 8.12; 50% female; time intervals in months: T1-T2 = 13.23, T2-T3 = 7.03), who were acquiring either Italian or Turkish as a heritage language and German or French as a societal language. Across all measurement time points, children’s receptive vocabulary and sentence comprehension were assessed using linguistically and psychometrically parallelized language tests. Moreover, at the first measurement time point verbal short-term memory abilities were evaluated through a quasi-universal nonword repetition test.
The results of multi-level-structural-equation-modeling showed positive transfer effects from the heritage language skills to the societal language development (b = .011, p = .013) as well as from the societal language skills to the heritage language development (b = .010, p = .008) in sentence comprehension. Against our expectation, verbal short-term memory did not moderate these transfer effects. No transfer or interference effects were found for receptive vocabulary development in either language.
These findings suggest a positive dynamic between the preschoolers’ two languages, especially in shared syntactic structures, which appears to facilitate sentence comprehension in both languages. However, vocabulary development does not seem to benefit from transfer, possibly due to its mainly semantic nature, which might offer fewer opportunities for cross-linguistic transfer than entire sentences with an additionally syntactical component. The unexpected absence of moderation by verbal memory may hint that the short-term memory tasks used in this study may not sufficiently capture the broader domain of verbal working memory necessary to reveal its potential moderating role. Understanding that bilingual preschoolers mainly benefit from their knowledge of both languages through cross-linguistic transfer and do not appear to experience substantial interferences might encourage educational strategies that support bilingual language development during the preschool years.

Author information

Author	Role
Leila Teresa Schächinger Tenés, University of Basel	Presenting author
Jessica Carolyn Weiner-Bühler, University of Basel	Non-presenting author
Alexander Grob, University of Basel	Non-presenting author
Robin Klaus Segerer, University of Basel	Non-presenting author

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