Majority language vocabulary and nonword repetition skills in children attending minority language immersion education

Abstract The present study examined nonword repetition (NWR) and comprehension/production of single-word vocabulary in the majority language (English) six- to eight-year-old English-Gaelic emergent bilingual children attending Gaelic-medium primary education (GMPE) (primary years 2 3). GMPE is an immersion model found Scotland where minority language, Gaelic, instruction, whereas English community not supported school first three schooling. All spoke as their (L1) had varying exposure second (L2) Gaelic outside setting. We investigated how individual factors, such age frequency exposure, psycholinguistic task modality, word class (for vocabulary), frequency, length, prosody NWR), influenced performance. Later higher nonverbal IQ were contributing predictors performance for vocabulary. For NWR, participants with earlier longer who also used both languages at home more performed significantly better on this task. These results suggest that differentially affects abilities; later L2 onset benefited L1 learning, boosted NWR skills these bilinguals.