Title: The acquisition of writing in a bilingual setting: mutual interferences of Portuguese and German
Authors:
Beatriz Dias; Biologist; Edith Menke, Speech Therapist, Clara Loureiro, Psychologist; Martin Lauterbach, Neurologist and Psychiatrist,
LEL (Language Research Laboratory), UNIC (Neurological
Clinical Investigation Unit), Faculty of Medicine of
E-mail: labling@fm.ul.pt
Postal address: Laboratório de Estudos de Linguagem, Centro de
Estudos Egas Moniz, Hospital Santa Maria, 1649-028 Lisboa
Introduction:
The ease of
children to acquire two, or more, languages is strongly related with the social
setting in which the languages are learned. The best language proficiency is
obtained in a setting called “one person – one language”.
Children that
attend a bilingual school learn simultaneously two different phoneme-grapheme
correspondence-systems (PGC-S). The PGC-S of each language does not give
unequivocal rules how to write all words of this language. In order to solve
these ambiguities the children must learn context rules and building up a word
form memory. Beside those intra-language ambiguities children that attend a
bilingual school have to deal with the fact that in the other language certain
phonemes are written differently. This
additional demand can lead up to inter-language ambiguities and consequently to
specific interference errors.
The aim of
this study is to investigate the interference of the two PGC-S
and its course along the progression of education. For this purpose a longitudinal
study was designed. The follow-up will last at least three years, in order to
describe the general and the intra-individual developmental pattern.
Methods:
Participants: After informed consent of the parents and oral assent
of the children, 77 pupils of the
Material: The material consists of three lists of words:
German and Portuguese mono- and disyllabic nouns and a list of pseudo-words. Words
were collected from the text books of the first grade of basic school, in order
to be sure that these words are known by all of the children. For the sampling
of the pseudo-words we chose only phonemes that make part of the phonetic repertoire
of both languages and obeyed to the phonotactic rules
of both. Thus, the phonetic form obtained, is the same for the two languages,
while the written form is different. Each list is 25 words long, preceded by 5
training items.
In order to
obtain information about the linguistic context of each child, we developed a
questionnaire for the parents. We asked for: the mother tongue; the knowledge
of German and Portuguese language of each of the parents; the number of
siblings and their language ability to speak both languages; the time that the
child has already contact with the languages; the time that the child spends
with German or Portuguese peers; if the child has contact, and to which extent,
to other languages beside the two investigated ones; finally we asked for an
estimation of the linguistic abilities of the child to speak both languages and
if applicable in other languages.
The
teachers of the children were also requested to make the same estimation about
the language abilities of their pupils to speak, to write and to understand
Portuguese and German.
Procedures:
The items
were recorded digitally and played back via PC with external loudspeakers using
Windows Media Player. The word lists were recorded with native speakers of
German or Portuguese. The recording of the pseudo-words was done by a
journalist who has English as mother tongue, but also speaks Portuguese and
German fluently. Thus we intended to avoid a bias to one of the investigated
languages. The items were played back from a digital recording to groups of
five to nine children in a dictation task. Altogether the children wrote four
lists. The pseudo-word list were presented twice, in a Portuguese and in a
German setting and the children were asked to write them according to the phoneme-grapheme
correspondence rules of each language. The sequence, if Portuguese or German
was presented first, as well as if pseudo-word or words came first, was
alternated at random. The language, in which the instructions were given, was
always congruent to the language that the children were asked for to write in
the following dictation. According to this we obtained four sub-groups. Because
of the difficulty of the task and to be not too demanding with the pupils of
the second grade, we shortened the lists to 15 words each. The pupils of the
second grade wrote 80 items and the pupils of the third and fourth grade wrote
120 items. After dictation of the half of the items the children paused for at
least 10 minutes before going forward to the other lists of words and pseudo-words,
dictated in the other language.
The
Portuguese monolingual group performed only the dictation of words and pseudo-words
written according to the phoneme-grapheme rules of Portuguese.
With the
help of the information obtained by the parental and teacher’s questionnaire,
we classified the children of the study group in three sub-groups: truly
bilingual, German and Portuguese mother tongue.
Data analysis:
The number
of correct answers and the type of errors are the dependent variables in this
study. Orthographic errors were
analyzed on five different levels:
1. We counted the overall error rate for each list;
2. We calculated an error index that consists of the quotient of the
number of errors divided through the number of phonemes of the word. The value
of this index varies from 0 to1. Whereas 0 is a correct answer, 1 means that
for every segment of the word an error was found. By definition we considered all
forms that exceeded an index of 0,75 as not
classifiable.
3. We adopted the classification schema of Bishop and Clarkson, 2003,
for orthographic errors. In this schema all forms are classified weather they
are orthographically or phonetically acceptable or not: orthographically
acceptable (OA); orthographically unacceptable (OU); phonetically acceptable (PhA); phonetically unacceptable (PhU).
These results in the following four categories: OA/PhA, OA/PhU,
OU/PhA, OU/PhU. They describe differentially the
severity of an orthographic error. OA/PhA represents the less severe error, as
the auditory discrimination of the stimulus was well succeeded, but the child
chose the wrong form among the other homophonic forms. OI-errors indicate insufficient
knowledge of the graphotactic rules and PhU-errors indicate difficulties in the discrimination of
the phonetic sequence. In this contexto the OU/PhU-errors represent the most severe errors, since both
steps of the correspondence process are disturbed..
4. We describe the error type in a so called SIOA-analysis. The letter
“S” designates substitution errors. These are further subdivided into errors of
generalization (a homophonic phoneme is wrongly written with the dominant
form), interference (a phoneme is written following the rules of the other
language), minimal pairs (the phoneme is substituted by another which
distinguishes only in one articulatory aspect), context rule (the item is
written wrongly because of a lack of knowledge of a context rule) and simple
substitutions (none of the above mentioned categories is observed). The letter
“I” designates inversions, where all graphemes are present but the sequence of
graphemes is inverted. The letter “O” designates omission of graphemes and
finally the letter “A” corresponds to additions of graphemes.
5. Accents wrongly used in Portuguese and nouns written without capitals
in German were also registered. If a stimulus word was substituted by another
more frequent word, we classified this as a “verbal paragraphia”.
A pseudo-word transformed into a word was classified as a “lexicalization”.
Whereas the
first three levels of analyses refer to the whole word, the SIOA-schema is a
sub-segmental analysis.
Statistical approach and hypothesis:
Parametric
and non-parametric statistical tests will be applied to compare the performance
for the Portuguese lists of the pupils of the German and
In order to
establish the developmental pattern, comparisons of the above mentioned
dependent variables between the grades of each school will also be performed.
The overall error rate as well as the number of errors in each sub-category is
expected to decrease with the progression of education.
In the
study group correlation between the parental and teacher’s questionnaires about
linguistic proficiency will be calculated and the results will determine the
allocation to language proficiency groups. The severity and the diversity of
the errors are expected to decrease with the progression of education in the
way that the rate of unacceptable errors should be minimal. For the not truly
bilingual children the phonetic unacceptable errors will preponderate in the
second language, because the auditory discrimination ability is less accurate
and the mother tongue can interfere in the writing. We expect to observe interference
errors especially for the pupils that are not truly bilingual. As there is no
word form memory for pseudo-word, we expect a higher incidence of interference
errors for the pseudo-words list, because its writing obliges the strict use of
the phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules.
The
sequence of languages (German/Portuguese or Portuguese/German) and stimulus
type (word/pseudo-word or pseudo-word/word) is not expected to have an effect
on test performance.
Perspectives
By a
preliminary analysis of the data we realized that pupils of the fourth grade
unexpectedly made still a considerable number of errors, especially in the pseudo-words.
Thus we plan to extend the study to the fifth and sixth grades.
We pretend
to introduce into the study a second control group of truly monolingual German
children, in order to have normative data for the German tasks.
In
collaboration with the teachers of the
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