In the Netherlands, Turkish–Dutch children constitute a substantial group of children who learn to speak Dutch at the age of four after they learned to speak Turkish. These children are generally academically less successful. Academic success appears to be affected by both language proficiency and working memory skill. The goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between language skills and working memory in Turkish–Dutch and native-Dutch children from low-income families. The findings revealed reduced Dutch language and Dutch working-memory skills for Turkish–Dutch children compared to native-Dutch children. Working memory in native-Dutch children was unrelated to their language skills, whereas in Turkish–Dutch children strong correlations were found both between Turkish language skills and Turkish working-memory performance and between Dutch language skills and Dutch working-memory performance. Reduced language proficiencies and reduced working-memory skills appear to manifest itself in strong relationships between working memory and language skills in Turkish–Dutch children. The findings seem to indicate that limited verbal working-memory and language deficiencies in bilingual children may have reciprocal effects that strongly warrants adequate language education.
The aim of this study was to investigate whether bilingually raised children in the Netherlands, who receive literacy instruction in their second language only, show an advantage on Dutch phoneme‐awareness tasks compared with monolingual Dutch‐speaking children. Language performance of a group of 47 immigrant first‐grade children with various different cultural backgrounds and a subsample of 29 Turkish–Dutch bilingual immigrant children was compared with those of 15 first‐grade monolingual native Dutch children from similar low‐socioeconomic backgrounds. All children were tested on Dutch phoneme awareness, vocabulary and word decoding. The Turkish–Dutch children were also tested on Turkish phoneme awareness and Turkish vocabulary. Dutch vocabulary scores of the bilingual children were below that of the monolingual Dutch children. Neither the entire group of bilingual children nor the subsample of Turkish–Dutch children were better or worse on phoneme awareness than monolingual Dutch children. However, Turkish–Dutch children scored better on the Dutch tasks for phoneme awareness and vocabulary than on the Turkish tasks. Language proficiency in the adopted language of bilingual children appears to quickly exceed that of their native language, when no instruction in the first language is provided.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.