The acquisition of writing in a bilingual setting: mutual interferences of Portuguese and German

Edith Menke

Clara Loureiro

Beatriz Dias

Martin Lauterbach (mlauterbach@fm.ul.pt)

Language Research Laboratory

Neurological Clinical Investigation Unit

Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon

Lisbon, Portugal

Children that attend a bilingual school learn simultaneously two different phoneme-grapheme correspondence-systems (PGC-S). The PGC-S of each language does not give unequivocal rules how to write all words of this language. In order to solve these ambiguities the children must learn context rules and written word forms. Beside those intra-language ambiguities the other language realizes certain phonemes differently, what leads up to inter-language ambiguities. This additional demand can cause specific interference errors.

We started a longitudinal study in the German School in Lisbon, in which we dictate the children German and Portuguese Words and Neologisms. The stimuli are controlled for inter-language ambiguities and phonemes that only exist in one of the languages. Order of presentation (words and neologisms) is controlled for as well as the language in which the instructions are given. Number and type of error are the independent variables. The children are grouped according whether they are truly bilingual or German/Portuguese is their first language. Comparison are made between second, third and forth grade and between children that are monolingual either in German or Portuguese and the bilingual children. We expect language interferences for the children with a clear dominant mother tongue, especially for phonemes that exist in both languages with a different realization.

Key words: bilingualism, phoneme-grapheme correspondence, acquisition of writing