The role of educational setting in the development of verbal aspect and executive functions: evidence from Greek-German bilingual children

Does Timing in Acquisition Modulate Heritage Children’s Language Abilities? Evidence from the Greek LITMUS Sentence Repetition Task

“…Papastefanou and colleagues, for example, found overall performance in the Greek SRT to improve with age in Greek heritage children. 8 The amount of current formal instruction in Greek showed no correlation with either early or late structures, in line with the findings of Andreou et al (2020), but in contrast to several other studies (Dosi and Papadopoulou 2019;Bongartz and Torregrossa 2020;Rodina et al 2020). Further research is needed to better understand the role of formal input at school.…”

“…Accordingly, relations between memory and HL acquisition are likely to depend on the specific tasks used. The studies by Andreou et al (2020) and by Dosi and Papadopoulou (2019) are cases in point: Andreou et al (2020) used complex working memory measures (via backward digit recall and a rotating figure task) and found no effect on overall SRT performance in heritage Albanian. Similarly, in the study by Dosi and Papadopoulou (2019), there was no significant relation between scores in an updating task and production and comprehension of verbal aspect in heritage Greek.…”

“…Few studies have examined the role of formal instruction in HL acquisition, with mixed results (Dosi and Papadopoulou 2019;Andreou et al 2020;Bongartz and Torregrossa 2020;Rodina et al 2020, see also Rinke and Flores 2021, for the role of formal instruction compared to exposure to the colloquial register). As for verbal aspect in Greek-German children in Germany, Dosi and Papadopoulou (2019) found that the educational setting influenced children's performance in both comprehension and production: children attending a Greek-dominant school outperformed their age peers from a German-dominant school. Bongartz and Torregrossa (2020) analyzed discourse abilities such as story length, syntactic complexity, and lexical diversity in Greek and in German narratives of children who attended either one of the two schools featuring in Dosi and Papadopoulou (2019) study or German mainstream schools with afternoon weekly Greek classes.…”

Measures of Bilingual Cognition – From Infancy to Adolescence

“…For this reason, the current work focuses on simultaneous/early bilinguals (as a control for AoA and proficiency). Three years is a commonly accepted cut-off for simultaneous or early bilingualism within the literature (e.g., Dosi & Papadopoulou, 2019 ; Kapa & Colombo, 2013 ; Patterson, 2002 ), and although we acknowledge the arbitrariness of such a cut-off, we wished to remain consistent with other studies. It is also important to note that there is a body of literature that focuses on bilingual children with a later AoA for their second language (e.g., Adesope et al, 2010 ; Donnelly et al, 2019 ; Gunnerud et al, 2020 ), which could be the focus of a separate review.…”

Aspect in Heritage Greek: evidence from elicited production and online judgments

“…Overall, they found that aspect is vulnerable, although not to the same extent for all groups and language combinations. Thus, child HSs of Greek living in Germany exhibited a performance closer to monolingual children with a mean accuracy of 77% and 82% in comprehension and production, respectively (Dosi & Papadopoulou, 2019), although their dominant language does not encode aspect morphologically. On the other hand, Greek-Albanian heritage children living in Albania exhibited an overall lower performance with a mean accuracy of 62.2%, although their dominant language encodes aspect (Dosi et al, 2016a), perhaps due to their lower exposure to Greek.…”