Cognate and Non-Cognate Lexical Access in Turkish of Bilingual and Monolingual 5 years-old Nursery School Children

Abstract

This study aims to characterize the development of French-Turkish bilingual children’s lexicon in order to better determine the nature of the difficulties they encounter as well as the specificities of their language use. In order to do this, 16 French-Turkish bilingual, 16 French monolingual and 20 Turkish monolingual 5 year-old nursery school children were asked to name pictures whose names are (i) cognates and (ii) non cognates in both languages. Our results reveal a high level of performance in cognate word recognition for French-Turkish bilinguals. This proves that these bilingual children knew these common words implicitly. On the one hand, this result questions the idea according to which a bilingual would not use words resulting from his L1 when he produces the word in his L2; and, on the other hand, it supports arguments in favor of the theory according to which both languages are activated for bilinguals even when using only one language.

Keywords

• turkish
• lexical access
• cognates/non-cognates
• bilingual children
• nursery school
• turkish migration
• france