Effects of Dominance in Exposure and Linguistic Distance in the Bilingual Proficiency Profiles of Dutch-German and Greek-German School-Age Bilinguals

Bilingual development is characterized by systematic variability, so called profile effects. This paper investigates dominance in exposure and linguistic distance as potential sources of bilingual profile effects by comparing the lexical and narrative profiles of Greek-German bilinguals to those of Dutch-German bilinguals.

Both bilingual groups, aged 10–11 years, were recruited from bilingual school-contexts in Germany. The Greek-German bilinguals (N=15) constitute a classic heritage language population with a fairly distantly related language combination, the Dutch-German bilinguals (N=15) constitute an under-researched group of bilingual speakers with a very closely related language combination. Participants were asked about their language exposure and underwent a productive vocabulary task and a narrative production task in both languages.

Findings indicate that dominance in exposure did not directly translate into dominance in lexical proficiency, which might be related to a cognate facilitation effect in the lexical tasks for the Dutch-German bilinguals. The narrative analysis indicates that, on group-level, dominance in exposure translated into dominance in narrative performance. A correlational analysis showed that dominance affected narrative measures differently and correlated differently with narrative measures depending on the group and, thus, language combination. However, it could not be affirmed that the linguistic proximity of Dutch and German balanced out dominance effects in general, since dominance in that group of bilinguals was too stark.

It is concluded from this that dominance in exposure and linguistic distance interact in bilingual development, but that this relationship is also dependent on the magnitude of dominance and the type of task and linguistic domain under investigation.