Linguists and psychologists alike have long overlooked the study of creole languages. We know very little about language and reading acquisition in young creole speakers. The aim of the present study was to examine the development of reading-related skills in native speakers of Haitian Creole (HC), a French-based creole, educated in French. In order to isolate the effects of speaking two highly similar languages, we compared Haitian children in 1st and 2nd grade to Spanish-French bilingual children and French monolingual children from European descent. Children from our sample were from five different schools in Montreal and had similar socioeconomic status. Participants were tested individually over three sessions on French standardized and experimental tasks assessing metalinguistic awareness, reading, comprehension, vocabulary and mathematical skills. Bilingual children were also tested on reading and spelling tasks in HC and Spanish. Results showed that HC and Spanish bilinguals performed as well as French native speakers on metalinguistic and reading tasks. However, Spanish-speaking children received lower scores than children in the two other groups on a receptive vocabulary measure. In an experimental task comparing the spelling of words of varying phonological similarity in HC and French, Haitian children had more difficulty spelling words that are cognates in HC and French than homophones or noncognate translations. Findings from this study were interpreted in light of the Bilingual Interactive Activation model (Dijsktra & Van Heuven, 1998).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.112514 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Sauvé, Lisa-Marie. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002712569, proquestno: AAIMR51402, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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