Processus implicite de dénomination de mots chez des enfants bilingues franco-turcs de 5 ans

Abstract

The current debate on bilingual speech proposes a cross-language activity in selecting languages (Grainger 1991, Dijkstra & Van Heuven 2002, Kroll et al. 2008). If it is a fact, what happens in cases of cognates, words that have the same meaning and pronunciation in both languages? For instance, the Turkish language has borrowed more than 4000 words from French in the 20th century. These words are exclusively written according to Turkish phonetic rules and pronounced almost the same way in both languages. To address this question, we devised a psycholinguistic task that involved 36 pictures to be named. This study was carried out with 18 Turkish-French bilingual individuals and 18 French monolingual individuals, all 5 years old, living in the vicinity of Lyon and attending the same pre-school. Within this study, we realised that some children use their knowledge in their first language (Turkish) whereas the task had been proposed in their dominant language (French). Our results indicated superior denomination performance from bilingual subjects only for cognate words versus non cognate words. This finding suggests that 5-year-old bilinguals implicitly know that these words are common in both languages. These findings seem to be incompatible with the hypothesis that a bilingual person does not use his/her first language’s knowledge in the production of a second language (Poulisse 1999, Costa & Santestéban 2004), but they appear to be in line with the idea that two languages are activated at the same time even though only one is used in production (Kroll et al. 2008).

Keywords

• bilingualism
• cognates
• French
• lexical access
• loanwords
• Turkish