Abstract:

With the aim of investigating the role of first language skills in second language acquisition and school achievement in the immigration context, this study presents the findings of the home language skills of the third-generation Turkish-Dutch bilingual children (n=24) living in the Netherlands by comparing them with their monolingual peers (n=24) living in Turkey. Turkish language skills of the bilingual and monolingual group have been tested through word definition, word order repetition, grammaticality judgment, syntagmatic and paradigmatic word relations, lexical comprehension, lexical production and semantic fluency tasks. The results reveal that the bilingual children lag behind their monolingual peers in word definition, semantic fluency, syntagmatic word relations and lexical production tasks. The causes can be attributed to limited first language input and lack of institutional support for immigrant languages, which may lead to problems on children’s concept and cognitive development besides second language acquisition.

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