Bidialectal literacy and cognitive control

This paper will present a research project that investigates to what extent differences in language stimulation in geographically defined Norwegian cohorts leads to differences in cognitive development and thus cognitive performance. The project is part of the large interdisciplinary project Learning Regions that seeks to understand regional differences in school achievement among Norwegian pupils. The basis for the subproject on bidialectal literacy is the fact that Norwegian kids who grow up with Nynorsk Norwegian as the language of instruction are also massively exposed to Bokmål Norwegian as the latter written variety of Norwegian completely dominate public life in the country, also literature and mass media for children. “Nynorsk kids” therefore receive a more varied kind of language stimulation related to their native language than kids who grow up with Bokmål Norwegian. The question is to what extent the varied language stimulation is an advantage not only to language development but also to general cognitive development, i.e. similar to the well-documented advantages seen in bilingual children worldwide The study will conduct a comparative investigation of 1st and 8th graders from the two counties Sogn og Fjordane and Nord-Trøndelag. Altogether 400 pupils will be subject to a battery of psychometric tests that measure the ability to switch between different tasks, disregard distractions and memory performance. Lexical decision tasks will also be included in the test battery. The two counties are comparable in terms of socio-economic standards, but they differ significantly in terms of school achievement as measured by national tests in Norwegian, math and English. Sogn og Fjordane pupils perform among the best in the country, whereas Nord-Trøndelag pupils perform below average. Linguistically speaking the counties differ in that Sogn og Fjordane is a Nynorsk county whereas Nord-Trøndelag is a Bokmål county. The dialects in Sogn og Fjordane are generally considered to be close to the Nynorsk written standard whereas the dialects of Nord-Trøndelag by no means are equally close to Bokmål. The working hypothesis in the investigation is that there should not be any major differences between the 1st graders from the two counties since the effect of literacy should not have kicked in yet. However, among the 8th graders we expect that the different language stimulation should have led to noticeable differences in cognitive performance. If noticeable effects of the difference in language stimulation are observed, it should have a significant impact on how language variation is valued not only in the teaching of reading and writing skills but in early education per se. And the importance will be significant also outside the particular Norwegian situation.