Bilingual effects in foreign language learning

Abstract This study tests the hypothesis that bilingualism is associated with advantages in learning foreign languages. We compare oral (narrative) English skills of 15 Dutch monolinguals (aged 10–12) and 15 age-matched bilinguals acquiring Dutch and Serbian/Croatian. We also test the hypothesis that bilinguals speaking an aspectual home language have an advantage over Dutch monolinguals in learning the English progressive aspect. Narratives produced by adult L1 English speakers were used to establish a baseline of aspectual choices. The results demonstrate that bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on narrative length, lexical diversity and grammatical accuracy, but not on syntactic complexity. Regarding grammatical aspect, monolinguals overused simple forms and underused progressive verb forms, whereas bilinguals used progressives at native-like rates. However, bilinguals slightly overused simple (non-progressive) forms. Bilingual children with higher proficiency in English and Serbian/Croatian and those producing more imperfectives in Serbian/Croatian narratives were less likely to use non-progressive verb forms in English.