Cross-linguistic interactions influence reading development in bilinguals: a comparison between early balanced French-Basque and Spanish-Basque bilingual children
Lallier, M., Acha, J. and Carreiras, M. (2016), Cross-linguistic interactions influence reading development in bilinguals: a comparison between early balanced French-Basque and Spanish-Basque bilingual children. Dev Sci, 19: 76–89. doi:10.1111/desc.12290
Resumen
This study investigates whether orthographic consistency and transparency of languages have an impact on the development of
reading strategies and reading sub-skills (i.e. phonemic awareness and visual attention span) in bilingual children. We evaluated
21 French (opaque)-Basque (transparent) bilingual children and 21 Spanish (transparent)-Basque (transparent) bilingual
children at Grade 2, and 16 additional children of each group at Grade 5. All of them were assessed in their common language
(i.e. Basque) on tasks measuring word and pseudoword reading, phonemic awareness and visual attention span skills. The
Spanish speaking groups showed better Basque pseudoword reading and better phonemic awareness abilities than their French
speaking peers, but only in the most difficult conditions of the tasks. However, on the visual attention span task, the French-
Basque bilinguals showed the most efficient visual processing strategies to perform the task. Therefore, learning to read in an
additional language affected differently Basque literacy skills, depending on whether this additional orthography was opaque
(e.g. French) or transparent (e.g. Spanish). Moreover, we showed that the most noteworthy effects of Spanish and French
orthographic transparency on Basque performance were related to the size of the phonological and visual grain used to perform
the tasks.