Bilingual advantage in L3 vocabulary acquisition: evidence of a generalized learning benefit among classroom-immersion children

Abstract The present study explored whether emergent bilingual children showed enhanced abilities to learn L3 vocabulary including written, spoken and conceptual forms compared monolinguals, the impact of L2/L3 cross-language similarities on such an effect. To this end, we contrasted English word learning performance French fifth-graders attending either a monolingual school program or classroom-immersion with German as L2. Half items be learned were German/English (L2/L3) cognate words while other half (L3) words. Learning was assessed forced-choice recognition task, go/no-go auditive task orthographic judgment task. Results yielded generalized advantage, outperforming monolinguals all tasks, irrespective cognateness, except for These findings advocate advantage in that is globally not driven by specific language properties cognates, written modality.