2018 Sat Session B 1445

Saturday, November 3, 2018 | Session B, Conference Auditorium | 2:45pm

Use of contrastive inference for reference resolution of a novel word in monolingual and bilingually exposed children
I. Lorge, N. Katsos

BACKGROUND: Children growing up in a multilingual environment face challenges related to the need to monitor the speaker’s linguistic abilities, more frequent communication failures, and having to acquire a large amount of words in a limited amount of time compared to monolinguals. As a result, bilingual learners may develop different word learning strategies, rely more on some strategies than others and/or engage cognitive resources such as theory of mind and attention skills in different ways. Recently, it has been suggested that regular exposure to a second language might lead to changes in perspective-taking and word learning regardless of level of proficiency achieved (Fan et al., 2015; Liberman et al., 2017, Menjivar & Akhtar, 2017, Yow et al., 2017).

HYPOTHESIS: The goal of our study was to investigate whether bilingual exposure leads to improvements in the ability to use pragmatic inference for reference assignment of a novel word using a new type of pragmatic cue (contrastive adjective) not yet investigated in bilinguals.

METHOD: We used a task where the child had to pick the referent of a novel word (an unknown alien) after hearing an instruction using an adjective-noun combination (e.g., ‘Touch the wet gorp’) (see Figure 1). Since there were two semantically compatible referents (two wet ‘aliens’), subjects had to pragmatically infer that the intended referent was the one with a dry counterpart.

In addition, we added a condition where the contrastive adjective was stressed (ie., ‘Touch the WET gorp’) and a control condition where only one referent was semantically compatible (see Figure 2) in a within-subject design crossing items and word/alien combinations.

PARTICIPANTS: 270 children aged 4-6 years old recruited from six schools in London and Cambridge. 138 children (mean age= 62.73) had been exposed daily to a second language for at least a year, including children in French immersion program (n=26), sequential bilinguals (n=18), simultaneous bilinguals (n=26) and children having English as Additional Language (EAL) (n=68). The other 132 children had had no regular exposure to a language other than English (mean age=64.81).

RESULTS: Children were above chance in selecting the target over the distractor in the stressed (crita) condition (m=0.57, sd=0.49, t = 4.1533, df = 950, p=3.572e-05) but not in the non- stressed (crit) condition (m=0.51, sd=0.50, t = 0.62249, df = 930, p= 0.5338). We fit a mixed logistic regression model with random intercepts for participant and item and an interaction term for condition and bilingual status. As expected, bilinguals performed significantly worse than monolinguals in the control condition, even when vocabulary level and SES were controlled for, due to generally lower English proficiency. However, they performed significantly better than monolinguals in both critical conditions (see Figure 3) relatively to the control.

CONCLUSIONS:These results may help explain bilingual children’s ability to attain proficiency in their languages and ‘catch up’ with their monolingual peers despite reduced input and early delays in vocabulary knowledge by highlighting potentially heightened socio-pragmatic skills.

References

Fan, S. P., Liberman, Z., Keysar, B., & Kinzler, K. D. (2015). The exposure advantage: Early exposure to a multilingual environment promotes effective communication. Psychological Science, 26(7), 1090-1097.

Liberman, Z., Woodward, A. L., Keysar, B., & Kinzler, K. D. (2017). Exposure to multiple languages enhances communication skills in infancy. Developmental science, 20(1)

Menjivar, J., & Akhtar, N. (2017). Language experience and preschoolers’ foreign word learning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(3), 642-648.

Yow, W. Q., Li, X., Lam, S., Gliga, T., Chong, Y. S., Kwek, K., & Broekman, B. F. (2017). A bilingual advantage in 54-month-olds’ use of referential cues in fast mapping. Developmental science, 20(1).