Orientation to Language in Ukrainian-English Bilingual Children

Abstract

CUMMINS, JAMES, and MULCAHY, ROBERT. Orientation to Language in Ukrainian-English Bilingual Children. CmLD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 1239-1242. The present study was designed to investigate the influence of bilingualism on children's awareness of the arbitrary nature of wordreferent relationships and on their ability to analyze linguistic input. 2 groups of children attending a Ukrainian-English bilingual program in Edmonton, Canada, were compared with unilingual control groups matched for IQ, SES, sex, and age at both grade 1 and 3 levels. 1 group of children in the bilingual program had extensive Ukrainian at home and was judged by teachers to be relatively fluent in Ukrainian. The second group had little or no Ukrainian at home and was judged by teachers to have little fluency in Ukrainian. 72 children participated in the study, 12 in each cell. It was found that the bilingual children who were judged to be relatively fluent were significantly better able to analyze ambiguities in sentence structure than were either of the other groups. However, no differences were found between the language groups in awareness of the arbitrary nature of word-referent relationships.