COMPETING LANGUAGE SYSTEMS OF THE MULTILINGUAL - DEVELOPMENTAL-STUDY OF DECODING AND ENCODING PROCESSES

A cross-section method was used to study the developmental changes in elementary decoding and encoding processes of 163 Swedish-German bilingual students, whose length of residence in Sweden varied. It was demonstrated that decoding in two languages, expressed in terms of reaction time, develops faster than encoding. The point at which a shift occurs and Swedish becomes the better language, despite predominantly German schooling, is 4 to 5 years of Swedish residence for decoding and 6 years for encoding. Comparisons of Swedish and German monolinguals with bilingual and trilingual subjects indicated significantly longer reaction times in both languages for the multilinguals, most noticeably on the encoding tasks. The slower reaction time to verbal stimuli in multilinguals is explained by (a) the less frequent usage of two or three languages compared with one and (b) the interference of the competing language systems. The results support an interdependence hypothesis of bilingual storage. © 1979 Academic Press, Inc.