The Correlation of Early Multilingualism and Language Aptitude

Abstract

Since the 1960s, studies comparing bilinguals and multilinguals to monolinguals have found bi/multilinguals to be advantaged in several linguistic areas, including language aptitude. Linguists believe this to be due to multilinguals exhibiting, among other things, a heightened metalinguistic awareness. Since most studies, however, rarely differentiate between bi/multilingualism acquired before the age of five and bi/multilingualism language competence acquired later in life, this study set out to investigate the interface of early bi/multilingualism and language aptitude, hypothesizing that early bi/multilinguals would outperform late bi/multilinguals on language aptitude tests. We analyzed the test scores of thirty-seven 15–35 year-old participants based in Vienna, who sat the MLAT III, MLAT IV, MLAT IV tests, as well as the LLAMA_B. They were categorized as monolinguals (n = 11), bilinguals (n = 17) or multilinguals (n = 9) according to the age of onset of their languages. Attitudinal and motivational factors were additionally investigated with the help of a questionnaire and then correlated with the test scores. As a result, this study found the overall test scores of early bi/multilinguals to be statistically indistinguishable from monolinguals (late bi/multilinguals), meaning early bi/multilinguals were not found to score better at language aptitude tests than monolinguals. When analyzing the sub-scores, it was surprisingly only in terms of grammatical sensitivity (as measured by the MLAT IV) that monolinguals significantly (p =.036) outperformed bilinguals and multilinguals. Factors such as gender, education, motivation, facility of acquisition and time invested into improving language skills were also found to have a significant impact on the participant’s language aptitude scores.