The facilitation effect and language thresholds

Lechner and Siemund (2014) set out to determine whether bilinguals have an advantage for learning additional languages over monolinguals, purporting to evaluate the Threshold Hypothesis of Cummins (1979a) in this context. The study investigated the attainment of English literacy by Turkish-German, Vietnamese-German, and RussianGerman simultaneous and sequential bilinguals for whom English is a third language, and found significant correlations (at 0.01 level) for the second language (German) with the third language (English) at 0.580, and for the heritage language with the second language at 0.638; while the heritage language correlated with the third language at 0.277, the result was non-significant (N = 34). This crosslinguistic transfer effect is well-documented in the scholarly literature for first language (L1) and second language (L2) learners (Genesee et al., 2006; Goldenberg, 2011), but very little prior work has been done to examine crosslinguistic transfer of literacy among trilinguals. The Threshold Hypothesis specifically points to ability levels in the first language as the mechanism which facilitates attainment in the second language (extended to a third language for Lechner and Siemund). The primary conceptual problem with “ability” in the first language is that it lacks any grounded theoretical description of “levels,” and simply equates social status with linguistic ability much as classical prescriptivist ideology does (MacSwan and Rolstad, 2003, 2010; Wiley and Rolstad, 2014). Cummins (1976) developed the Threshold Hypothesis to account for an apparent conflict in findings regarding the cognitive benefits of bilingualism. Earlier studies concluded that cognitive progress and school achievement were negatively affected by bilingualism, while more recent research appeared to show “positive cognitive consequences.” Cummins noted that the studies that found a negative effect involved linguistic minorities, and those finding a positive effect involved a condition of “additive bilingualism” in which linguistic majority children are learning an additional language. Cummins theorized that the linguistic minorities were undergoing loss of their first language, and that “the level of linguistic competence attained by a bilingual child may mediate the effects of his bilingual learning experiences on cognitive growth.” That is, reports of negative effects of bilingualism for “cognitive and scholastic progress” related to minority children’s (hypothesized) lower level of linguistic proficiency in the first language, as affected by acquiring a second, while children in the “additive” bilingual programs had the benefit of continued support of their first language. As Cummins (1976) put it,