Linguistics Journal | December 2007

December 2007. Volume 2 Issue 3

Title
Phonological Awareness in Bilingual and Trilingual Schoolchildren

Author
Georgia Andreou
University of Thessaly, Greece

Bio-Data
Georgia Andreou is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Special Education, University of Thessaly, Greece. She teaches several courses, including introduction to linguistics, psycholinguistics, and teaching Greek as a second language. Her research interests include, among others, bilingualism, neurolinguistics, language development in ADHD children.

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Abstract:

The aim of this study is to investigate phonological awareness in the third language of bilingual, and the second language of monolingual, school children. The subjects were all given two tests of phonological awareness in English, which was the third language of bilinguals and the second language of monolinguals. The results have shown that trilingual school children performed better than bilinguals in both of the tests, which means that their phonological awareness is better. Trilinguals have heightened sensitivity to the phonological units of words probably because they must attend carefully to the speech stream in order to make distinction among their three languages and to organize their developing lexicon.

Keywords: trilingualism, bilingualism, phonological awareness