Phonological and Morphological Skills in Emerging English-Hebrew Bilinguals

Metalinguistic abilities such as phonological and morphological awareness are important language proficiency components. Three interrelated studies, based on a longitudinal project, investigated the development of phonological and morphological skills in children with English as the home language and Hebrew as an emerging second language. Two cohorts were followed for two years: The first (N= 48) was followed from junior kindergarten (JK) to Grade 1, the second (N= 38) was followed from senior kindergarten (SK) to Grade 2. Order of acquisition of phonological and morphological skills was explored longitudinally and processes of transfer from the strong to the weak language were examined. Data were analyzed by using General Estimating Equations.Findings indicated improvement across grades on final phoneme and syllable deletion tasks and a decline between SK to Grade 1 on initial phoneme task in Hebrew. The decline may reflect a growing exposure to the Hebrew orthography and to its body + coda construct. Performance on final phoneme isolation and syllable deletion was predicted by English phonological awareness, but not initial phoneme isolation performance. In English and Hebrew, a gradual development from SK to Grade 2 was noted on different morphological components (inflections, derivations and compounds). Transfer of inflectional morphology from English to Hebrew was also noted. In Hebrew, children demonstrated the ability to produce nouns spontaneously followed by the ability to produce adjectives and verbs in a learning process that was more sequential than parallel, and that may reflect the method of instruction. The process of learning how to inflect words followed by the ability to derive words was demonstrated in both languages on parallel experimental measures and on the Hebrew narrative task. The children figured out the morphological combinations that were more frequent, consistent, or salient. This explains the relationship between English and Hebrew in terms of order of acquisition. The findings support the effect of cogintive universal processes and language specific characteristics on the developemt of English (L1) and Hebrew (L2). The findings bear theoretical implications and practical implications for school instruction methods, particularly among teachers who work with young bilingual children.Ph.D