Morphological awareness and reading comprehension: The case of an English-Turkish Bilingual Child versus a Turkish Monolingual Child

Authors : Evrim Eveyik Aydin

Pages : 1-47

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Publication Date : 2014-11-03

Article Type : Research

Abstract :  The current study aims to investigate the bilingual advantages in morphological processing and reading comprehension by comparing the performances of a 7 :4 year-old English-Turkish bilingual child and a 7:10 year-old Turkish monolingual child on two morphological awareness tasks, namely a derivation task and a decomposition task in Turkish developed for the purpose of the study, and on a reading comprehension task. The findings of the study revealed that the monolingual child outperformed the bilingual child both in morphological awareness and reading comprehension tasks. These findings supported Cummin’s threshold hypothesis suggesting that a critical level of proficiency in L2 must be reached if bilingual advantages in cognitive and linguistic functioning are to develop. Besides, the findings verified the relation between the morphological processing skills and reading comprehension.
Keywords : morphological processing, monolingual, linguistic functioning, reading comprehension