Bilingualism and cognition The acquisition of Frisian and Dutch

This dissertation investigates the interplay between bilingualism and cognition. This is done by examining the linguistic and cognitive development of 5- to 8-year-old children who grow up in Fryslân, a bilingual province in the north of the Netherlands where both Frisian and Dutch are spoken. The Frisian and Dutch language that are spoken nowadays share a large part of their vocabularies and morphosyntactic structures. This extensive overlap between the two linguistic systems offers a rich opportunity to investigate how cross-language similarity interacts with variables such as exposure, age of onset and cognitive functioning, and to investigate whether growing up with two closely related languages has an effect on children’s cognitive capacities. By following 120 Frisian-Dutch bilingual children over the course of three years, this dissertation seeks to deepen our understanding of the ways in which language and cognition interact.