Tuesday March 28, 14:10
Old Surgeons’ Hall — G10 (Drummond Library) Surgeons Square, High
School Yards EH1 1LZ
Øystein Vangsnes, UiT The Arctic University of Norway
*Cognitive and scholastic effects of bidialectal literacy*
[Northern Scholars]
Vangsnes et al. (2015) found that municipalities in which more than 50% of the pupils in lower and secondary school use the Nynorsk minority variety of Norwegian, the results on national tests in reading, arithmetic and English are better than predicted once variables concerning socio-economic status are taken into consideration. The attainment data were drawn from four national cohorts of 8th graders, amounting to some 240k individuals.
The effect of Nynorsk accounted for about 4% of the variance in the achievements. The interpretation of this finding was that the it may possibly be seen as an indirect effect of cognitive advantages of bidialectal literacy. A reasonable conjecture in the Norwegian context is that individuals growing up with Nynorsk as their main language in school will also acquire literacy in the majority variety Bokmål due to massive extracurricular exposure, whereas the converse in general does not hold: the average “Bokmål” pupil experience relatively meagre exposure to Nynorsk.
The interpretation is nevertheless challenged by the fact that although Nynorsk enjoys the same status as Bokmål qua national language, it has a regional stronghold in Western Norway, and the scholastic effect may thus be spurious and stem from some unknown regional factor that characterizes Western Norway. In two rounds of psychometric experiments we have attempted to probe the cognitive hypothesis further. In the first round, pupils (n = 480, 1st vs. 8th graders) from a Nynorsk and a Bokmål area with similar demographic structure were tested on working memory, executive functions and lexical decision. There were no differences on accuracy, but a somewhat surprising effect was that the better achieving pupils in the Nynorsk group showed slower response times. This finding is replicated in the second round of experiments where Nynorsk and Bokmål pupils (n = 120, 8th graders) from within the same region were tested on a slightly more advanced test battery.
This discrepancy between scholastic achievement and psychometric performance begs for scrutiny: the conclusions may potentially inform the current heated debate on cognitive effects of bilingualism.