title: The moderating effect of orthographic consistency on oral vocabulary learning in monolingual and bilingual children.
abstract: Two studies were conducted to assess whether (a) the incidental presence of print facilitates the acquisition of oral vocabulary, (b) the facilitative effect of print is moderated by phoneme-to-grapheme consistency, and (c) the findings obtained with monolingual children generalize to bilingual children. In total, 71 monolingual French-speaking children (M age = 9 years 2 months) in Study 1 and 64 bilingual children (M age = 9 years 3 months) in Study 2 participated in one of three conditions: consistent print, inconsistent print, or no print. Children were to learn novel labels for unfamiliar objects in a paired-associate paradigm. In both studies, print facilitated the acquisition and recall of expressive vocabulary. The effect of print consistency, however, varied across studies. As expected, monolingual children exposed to consistent print learned more novel labels than children exposed to inconsistent print. In contrast, bilingual children exposed to inconsistent print learned and recalled more labels than children exposed to consistent print. These intriguing findings might be due to differences in attention allocation during training.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 0W4, Canada.
authors.forename: Kathleen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Jubenville
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 0W4, Canada. Electronic address: monique.senechal@carleton.ca.
authors.forename: Monique
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sénéchal
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 0W4, Canada.
authors.forename: Melissa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Malette
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Children; Learning; Literacy acquisition; Orthographic consistency; Reading; Vocabulary