Monolingual and multilingual discrimination of written sequences' readability

Abstract

Multilingual literate landscapes are ubiquitous input for children in many places in the world. This type of input (albeit visual only) may propel literacy awareness, integration and cognitive assimilation of different writing and notational systems even before schooling. This study explores quantitatively and qualitatively the ways in which young multilingual children understand and interpret the principles underlying different writing systems. The focus is to compare how bilingual and monolingual children judge ‘readable and non-readable’ representations which are alphabetic or non-alphabetic (single, other or mixed); and whether readable strings comply with a qualitative and quantitative condition assigned to the string of signs presented. There are similarities as well as differences in the distinction as ‘readable’ between alphabetic and non-alphabetic notations among bilingual Ethiopian children and monolingual non-Ethiopian children who are pre-readers. Both groups regard as ‘readable’ sequences that contain varied and multiple combinations of alphabetic signs. There are revealing differences between the groups as to the quantity of signs in the sequence and whether it comes from a single, familiar or mixed alphabet. The Ethiopian bilingual children are more inclined to regard different alphabetic systems—whether they combine signs from within a single alphabet or from multiple alphabets—and tend to ‘detect’ them as ‘readable’ more so than non-Ethiopian monolinguals.