Lexical comprehension and production strategies in L1 and L2 of Turkish-French bilingual children in France
Résumé
Previous studies (Backus, 2013) on Turkish bilingual children’s languages in European countries agree in affirming that these children face important problems at school language of the country in which they live. Indeed very young bilinguals encounter difficulties, but these are essentially limited to gaps in vocabulary (Akinci, 2017).
The purpose of this presentation is to compare lexical comprehension and production strategies in L1 (Turkish) and L2 (French) of Turkish-French bilingual children born of immigrant parents in France with those of monolinguals in France and Turkey. Children’s vocabulary is investigated with a standardized picture naming task (Glück, 2011) in both languages on a sample of N = 180 primary school pupils (aged 6 to 10). Strategies were analyzed according to question types: Type 1 “what is it?”, Type 2 “what is it all about?”, Type 3 “what does he do?”, Type 4 “what do they do?”, Type 5 “what is the opposite of this word?”, Type 6 “what happened to him?”.
Results show that bilingual children have better vocabulary level in L1 at the age of 6 and that they made well progress in L2 at the age of 10 and the lexical gaps between two languages are also significantly reduced for 10 years-old. Different strategies were used by bilinguals according to question types, mainly description, substitution, categorization, approximation and translation for Types 1, 3 and 4; enumeration for Type 2; negation, overstatement and creation for Type 5; generalization in L2 and translation in L1 for Type 6.