Bilingual and Monolingual Children Attend to Different Cues when Learning New Words

Overview

Journal Front Psychol

Date 2012 Jun 2

PMID 22654777

Citations 19

Authors

Chandra L Brojde

Sabeen Ahmed

Eliana Colunga

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The way in which children learn language can vary depending on their language environment. Previous work suggests that bilingual children may be more sensitive to pragmatic cues from a speaker when learning new words than monolingual children are. On the other hand, monolingual children may rely more heavily on object properties than bilingual children do. In this study we manipulate these two sources of information within the same paradigm, using eye gaze as a pragmatic cue and similarity along different dimensions as an object cue. In the crucial condition, object and pragmatic cues were inconsistent with each other. Our results showed that in this ambiguous condition monolingual children attend more to object property cues whereas bilingual children attend more to pragmatic cues. Control conditions showed that monolingual children were sensitive to eye gaze and bilingual children were sensitive to similarity by shape; it was only when the cues were inconsistent that children's preference for one or the other cue was apparent. Our results suggest that children learn to weigh different cues depending on their relative informativeness in their environment.

Citing Articles

Word learning in monolingual and bilingual children: The influence of speaker eye-gaze.

Gangopadhyay I, Kaushanskaya M Biling (Camb Engl). 2024; 24(2):333-343.

PMID: 38873085 PMC: 11175166. DOI: 10.1017/s1366728920000565.

The effect of speaker reliability on word learning in monolingual and bilingual children.

Gangopadhyay I, Kaushanskaya M Cogn Dev. 2024; 64.

PMID: 38872995 PMC: 11174794. DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2022.101252.

Effect of speaker certainty on novel word learning in monolingual and bilingual children.

Buac M, Tauzin-Larche A, Weisberg E, Kaushanskaya M Biling (Camb Engl). 2023; 22(4):883-895.

PMID: 36919089 PMC: 10010316. DOI: 10.1017/s1366728918000536.

The effects of bilingualism on children's cross-situational word learning under different variability conditions.

Crespo K, Vlach H, Kaushanskaya M J Exp Child Psychol. 2023; 229:105621.

PMID: 36689904 PMC: 10088528. DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105621.

Social-Pragmatic Skills and Length of Bilingualism Predict Inhibitory Control in Children.

Slawny C, Crespo K, Weismer S, Kaushanskaya M J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2022; 65(10):3873-3880.

PMID: 36170591 PMC: 9927631. DOI: 10.1044/2022_JSLHR-21-00625.

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