Phoneme awareness, vocabulary and word decoding in monolingual and bilingual Dutch children

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate whether bilingually raised children in the Netherlands, who receive literacy instruction in their second language only, show an advantage on Dutch phoneme‐awareness tasks compared with monolingual Dutch‐speaking children. Language performance of a group of 47 immigrant first‐grade children with various different cultural backgrounds and a subsample of 29 Turkish–Dutch bilingual immigrant children was compared with those of 15 first‐grade monolingual native Dutch children from similar low‐socioeconomic backgrounds. All children were tested on Dutch phoneme awareness, vocabulary and word decoding. The Turkish–Dutch children were also tested on Turkish phoneme awareness and Turkish vocabulary. Dutch vocabulary scores of the bilingual children were below that of the monolingual Dutch children. Neither the entire group of bilingual children nor the subsample of Turkish–Dutch children were better or worse on phoneme awareness than monolingual Dutch children. However, Turkish–Dutch children scored better on the Dutch tasks for phoneme awareness and vocabulary than on the Turkish tasks. Language proficiency in the adopted language of bilingual children appears to quickly exceed that of their native language, when no instruction in the first language is provided.