The performance of L2 French children on the LITMUS-QU Nonword repetition task during their first year of exposure: impact of age, vocabulary size, verbal-short term memory and phonological awareness

• Letícia Almeida ^[1] ; Christophe Coupé ^[2]
  1. [1] Universidade de Lisboa

     Universidade de Lisboa

     Socorro, Portugal

     
  2. [2] University of Hong Kong

     University of Hong Kong

     RAE de Hong Kong (China)

     
• Localización: Bilingualism: Language and cognition, ISSN 1366-7289, Vol. 28, Nº 4, 2025, págs. 1015-1029
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In this study, we describe the performance of 62 newly immigrated children to France at a nonword repetition task (LITMUS-QU-NWR-FR) designed to evaluate bilingual children’s syllable structure. Children were between 6;0 and 9;1 and had diverse language backgrounds. They participated in our study during their first year of exposure to French. The majority of our children exhibited a good performance on the task. The variation observed is related to: (i) the properties of the nonwords: items with complex syllables are more difficult, as are items with three syllables in length; (ii) phonological awareness: children with a more developed L2 phonological awareness perform better at the task; and (iii) receptive vocabulary size: children with a larger L2 vocabulary size perform better at the task. Overall, our findings provide support for the argument that the LITMUS-QU-NWR-FR task can be used shortly after the onset of exposure to the L2.