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

Year 2014, Volume: 3 Issue: 5, 1 - 47, 10.11.2014

Evrim Eveyik Aydın

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

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