Understanding the regularities of letters and letter patterns in your own language is generally considered to be a supporting factor for reading development. This general orthographic knowledge (GOK) has been investigated by numerous studies in the past. It is not clear, however, what happens when bilingual children are exposed to two orthographies and thus two sources of input simultaneously.
GOK is assessed in bilingual children who speak and read in German as well as Croatian and German monolingual children via a letter detection task. Participants are asked to indicate whether a presented bigram contains a target letter. Bigram frequency is orthogonally varied: high in both orthographies (high-high), high in German and low in Croatian (high-low), low in German and high in Croatian (low-high) or low in both orthographies (low-low). All bigrams consist only of consonants. Accuracy and reaction times are recorded. Additional measures include spelling and reading fluency. Data is collected from 4th Grade of elementary school (age 9-11 years), with a planned sample size of 80 children per group.
We expect a frequency effect in processing speed: High-frequency bigrams are processed faster than low-frequency bigrams – in all participants. We also expect this effect to be moderated by bilingualism: Processing speed of bigrams in the “high-low” and “low-high” conditions is faster than in the “low-low” condition, but slower than the “high-high” condition, as representations of both languages are activated. We also expect GOK to explain unique variance in reading performance of monolingual children and the dominant language of bilingual children.