ABSTRACT
A considerable number of studies conducted since the early 1960s have reported that bilingual children performed at a significantly higher level than unilingual children on various measures of cognitive abilities (e.g. Bain 1975; Balkan 1970; Ben-Zeev 1977a, 1977b; Feldman and Shen 1971; Ianco-Worrall 1972; Liedke and Nelson 1968; Peal and Lambert 1962). Several of these studies have investigated aspects of bilingual children’s orientation to language. Feldman and Shen (1971), for example, reported that bilingual ‘head start’ children were superior to unilinguals in their ability to switch names and in the use of common names and nonsense names in relational statements. Ianco-Worrall (1972), in a study conducted in South Africa, reported that bilingual children brought up in a one-person, one-language home environment were more oriented to the semantic rather than the acoustic properties of words and were more aware of the arbitrary assignment of words to referents than were unilingual children. In studies conducted with middle-class Hebrew-English and lower-class Spanish-English bilinguals, Ben-Zeev (1977a, 1977b) has reported findings which suggest that bilinguals develop a more analytic orientation to language and more sensitivity to feedback cues. Ben-Zeev (1977b) hypothesized that bilinguals develop this analytic strategy towards language as a means of overcoming interlingual interference.
