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Sentence repetition and non-word repetition in early total French immersion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2019

Maureen Scheidnes Open the ORCID record for Maureen Scheidnes [Opens in a new window]
Maureen Scheidnes*
Affiliation:
Memorial University of Newfoundland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Recent research has focused on bilingual children’s performance on non-word repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks, but it remains unclear how their scores can be expected to vary as a function of language exposure, which creates challenges for developing age-appropriate performance expectations. With the goal of examining the impact of limited language exposure on these tasks, French NWR and SR performance from 33 first graders (mean age 6 years, 10 months) in early total French immersion in English-speaking Canada was compared to prior work on bilinguals acquiring French in France. With a mean length of exposure of 1 year, 7 months, but a mean cumulative length of exposure of only 3 months, the children in immersion have much less daily exposure to French than the bilinguals in France. The results showed that children in immersion patterned with the other bilinguals for NWR, but had much weaker SR performance. Within-subjects analyses revealed that, for SR, the children in immersion had stronger scores on wh-questions and relative clauses, which suggests that these structures may be less sensitive to language exposure.

Keywords

child L2 acquisitionearly total French immersionlanguage exposurenon-word repetitionsentence repetition
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 107 - 131
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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