Suchergebnisse

As populations become more mobile, so interest grows in bi- and multilingualism, particularly in the context of education. This volume focuses on the singular situation in Israel, whose complex multiculturalism has Hebrew and Arabic as official languages, English as an academic and political language, and tongues such as Russian and Amharic spoken by immigrants. Presenting research on bi- and trilingualism in Israel from a multitude of perspectives, the book focuses on four aspects of multilingualism and literacy in Israel: Arabic-Hebrew bilingual education and Arabic literacy development; sec

The present study explores the interplay among bilingualism, executive functions and creativity in problem solving among
adult male university students. In this context, the associations between two factors critical for understanding the topic, i.e. type of
bilingualism (i.e. balanced versus non-balanced bilingualism) and type of creative thinking (i.e. convergent versus divergent thinking) are
examined, as well. 28 Russian/Hebrew/English trilinguals (balanced Russian/Hebrew bilinguals), and 25 non-balanced Hebrew/English bilinguals
participated in the study. All participants performed several standard tasks on executive functions (Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Eriksen
flanker task, digit span test, Corsi block-tapping test) and two tests on creativity: Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Figural Form A)
and Remote Associates Test (in appropriate languages). The findings showed that the Russian-speaking participants performed better on the
Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, particularly in flexibility and fluency measures. On the Remote Associates Test, balanced bilinguals
outperformed non-balanced bilinguals in the English version and exhibited the same results in the Hebrew version of the test. In this case,
there were significant correlations between the Remote Associates Test results in all three languages in the Russian group. Thus, balanced
bilingualism seems to be also characterized by a well-organized language system in which all of the individual's languages are interconnected.
This appears to be a significant factor in the performance of balanced bilinguals on the Remote Associates Test in the different languages.
In addition, the findings seem to confirm the hypothesis that balanced bilingualism positively influences divergent thinking. The hypothesis
that performance of bilinguals on creativity tasks is linked to distinctions in the development of their executive functions was not confirmed.

The focus of the present study was the trajectory of the acquisition of noun pluralization in Hebrew as a window into the development of inflectional morphology among early sequential Russian-Hebrew speaking bilinguals. Our participants were six early sequential bilingual children between 36 and 42 months of age at the beginning of the study, who acquired Russian (L1) at home and at preschool within a 'first language first approach' and whose age at the onset of their acquisition of Hebrew (L2) was about 3 years. We investigated both qualitative and quantitative features of noun pluralization in Hebrew (L2) acquisition in order to determine (1) whether early sequential bilingual children are delayed or accelerated in this domain; (2) whether they show similar or different patterns of errors in comparison to the L1 children; and (3) at what age sequential bilingual children acquire regular versus irregular noun plural forms
compared with the L1 children.

We relied on a multi-faceted longitudinal analysis of noun pluralization, examining both correct and incorrect production- in structured elicitations as well as in (semi-) spontaneous interactions. Comparing our data to those collected for Hebrew L1 speakers, the results for monolinguals and early sequential bilinguals show a striking similarity with respect to the development of pluralization. These findings suggest that the accelerated rate of ESBs' L2 pluralization mechanism provides evidence of the linguistic maturation hypothesis.