Cognate and noncognate lexical access of Turkish-French bilingual and French and Turkish monolingual 5 years-old nursery school children

International audienceCurrent debates focus on the hypothesis of selective or nonselective lexical access modes for bilingual speakers during L1 and L2 productions. Some researches show evidence that both languages are active and influence performance (Costa et al., 1999; Kroll et al., 2006). Although there is abundant evidence for parallel activity of the bilingual’s two languages, finding that the unintended language is available during spoken production remains surprising.In France, many researches report important difficulties for early bilingual children from Turkish migration, especially for lexical and morpho-syntactic acquisition (Le Coz & Lhoste-Lassus 2011). The proposed presentation here aims to characterize the development of lexicon of French-Turkish bilingual children with the purpose better determine the nature of the difficulties they encounter as well as the specificities of their functioning.In order to do this, 16 French-Turkish bilingual, 16 French monolingual and 16 Turkish monolingual 5 years-old of nursery school children were asked to name (i) pictures whose names are cognates in the 2 languages and (ii) pictures whose names are non cognates in the 2 languages.Our results reveal high performances for cognate word recognition task for French-Turkish bilinguals. This proves that these bilingual children knew implicitly these common words. On the one hand, this result questions the idea according to which a bilingual would not use words resulting from his L1 when he produces the word in his L2 and, on the other hand, support arguments in favor of the theory according to which both languages are activated for bilinguals even when using only one language