Exploring the Effect of Bilingualism in Third Language Vocabulary Acquisition

Abstract

Abstract: The process of globalization and the associated strong increase inmigration across countries have brought an increased interest in bilingualism, asparents and educators are eager to understand the implications of a bilingualupbringing on the child’s development. A bilingual upbringing has potentially farreaching effects on a child’s cognitive abilities as well as its ability to learn newlanguages due to an increased metalinguistic awareness.This essay analyses the effect of bilingualism on vocabulary acquisition in athird language. To this end, the essay starts by reviewing bilingualism and its effectson cognitive ability and metalinguistic awareness, as well as the literature onlanguage and vocabulary learning more generally. The main body of the essay isfocused on recent empirical studies on the effect of bilingualism on third languagevocabulary acquisition, and devotes special attention to factors that could influencethe bilingual effect on vocabulary acquisition.The results of the studies, for the most part, suggest a possible advantagebilinguals have over monolinguals in learning vocabulary in a new language.Despite the fact that bilinguals often maintain a smaller vocabulary size in each oftheir native languages and likely arises in part because of superior executive control.Other factors such as the ability to suppress the interference of their primarylanguages and a better phonological short-term memory. Finally, bilinguals appearto draw from both languages when making connection to a new word, supportingthe notion that they derive an advantage simply from having access to more wordsin their primary languages compared to monolinguals who only have access towords in a single language. Overall, it appears that a mixture of the mentionedmechanisms drives the bilingual advantage when it comes to vocabulary learning ina third language, and future research is likely to yield more robust evidence on theexact mechanisms underlying a bilingual advantage.