Concept Acquisition in Malaysian Bilingual Children

Abstract

Following earlier work with Polish- and German-speaking children in Australia, a group of five-year-old Malaysian children bilingual in English and Malay and English and Chinese were pretested in both languages. They were then trained in one language on the conservation of weight, posttested on their other language, and again from one to two months later in both languages. Immediate improvements were obtained after training, but other untrained control groups also showed improvement on the delayed posttest. These results are considered together with the previous results. It is concluded that language plays a minor part in the acquisition of cognitive concepts and that young children will perform at a slightly higher level on these tasks if tested in their native language.

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References

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KEATS, D. M. , J. A. KEATS and A. R. WAN RAFAEI (forthcoming) "Performance of Malay and Chinese Children on vocabulary and operational tests in two languages." Australian Psychologist.