Abstract
Sentence repetition (SR) tasks have been extensively employed to assess bilingual children’s linguistic and cognitive resources. The present study examined whether monoliterate bilingual children differ from their monolingual (and monoliterate) peers in SR accuracy and cognitive tasks, and investigated links between vocabulary, updating, verbal and visuospatial working memory and SR performance in the same children. Participants were two groups of 35 children, 8–12 years of age: one group consisted of Albanian-Greek monoliterate bilingual children and the other of Greek monolingual children attending a monolingual-Greek educational setting. The findings demonstrate that the two groups performed similarly in the grammaticality scores of the SR. However, monolinguals outperformed the monoliterate bilinguals in SR accuracy, as well as in the visuospatial working memory and updating tasks. The findings did not indicate any bilingual advantage in cognitive performance. The results also demonstrate that updating and visuospatial working memory significantly predicted monolingual children’s SR accuracy scores, whereas Greek vocabulary predicted the performance of our monoliterate bilingual children in the same task. We attribute this outcome to the fact that monoliterate bilingual children do not rely on their fluid cognitive resources to perform the task, but instead rely on language proficiency (indicated by expressive vocabulary) while performing the SR.
Highlights
Sentence repetition (SR) is a task that has been thoroughly used among bilingual children to assess their language level where bilinguals are assumingly weak, and cognitive resources such as working memory, where bilinguals are arguably strong
The present study compares the performance of Albanian-Greek bilingual children, monoliterate in Greek, with monolingual Greek children in a Greek SR task
The two groups were matched in terms of Greek vocabulary and the monoliterate bilingual children were balanced in terms of their proficiency skills across the two languages as shown by their vocabulary scores in each language
Summary
Sentence repetition (SR) is a task that has been thoroughly used among bilingual children to assess their language level where bilinguals are assumingly weak, and cognitive resources such as working memory, where bilinguals are arguably strong. The episodic buffer is the mediator between working memory and long-term memory and is seen as a limited capacity temporary storage system. According to Alloway and Gathercole (2005), children with good scores on a battery of simple and complex memory tasks, demonstrated good performance on SR tasks. This link between SR and working memory can be attributed to the function of the episodic buffer as a system that integrates information from different modalities
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