Bilingualism and conversational understanding in young children

Abstract

The purpose of the two experiments reported here was to investigate whether bilingualism confers an advantage on children's conversational understanding. A total of 163 children aged 3 to 6 years were given a Conversational Violations Test to determine their ability to identify responses to questions as violations of Gricean maxims of conversation (to be informative and avoid redundancy, speak the truth, and be relevant and polite). Though comparatively delayed in their L2 vocabulary, children who were bilingual in Italian and Slovenian (with Slovenian as the dominant language) generally outperformed those who were either monolingual in Italian or Slovenian. We suggest that bilingualism can be accompanied by an enhanced ability to appreciate effective communicative responses.

Scalar implicatures in second language acquisition

“…Thus it is possible that our adult learners exhibit superior pragmatic competence compared to the native participants. Siegal et al (2009) is particularly relevant to the present discussion, because it examines pragmatic competence in bilingual and monolingual children. Children participating in this experiment were bilingual in Italian and Slovenian, or monolingual in either language.…”

“…Results of both experiments in Siegal et al (2009) (which follow the same procedure but have different participants) show that there is a definite advantage of the bilingual children over the monolingual ones on four Gricean maxims: Quantity II, Quality, Relation and Politeness. Bilingual children were more accurate in choosing non-redundant answers, true answers over false ones, answers that were relevant to the questions, and polite answers over rude ones.…”

Do young and old preschoolers exhibit response bias due to different mechanisms? Investigating children’s response time

“…This is supported by a longitudinal study of two toddlers' response tendencies to yes-no questions by Steffensen (1978), who stated, ''The child seems to be aware of only part of the illocutionary force of interrogation: he knows that he must respond'' (p. 234). Moreover, Siegal, Iozzi, and Surian (2009) reported that older preschoolers (4 years 9 months [4;9] to 6;0) understood pragmatic rules better than younger preschoolers (3;6 to 4;6). In addition, Okanda and Itakura (2010a) found that 2-to 5-year-old Japanese-French bilinguals with both low (M = 24.7 months) and high (M = 47.6) verbal age (assessed by the PVT) exhibited a strong yes bias to comprehensible yes-no questions.…”

Why are bilinguals better than monolinguals at false-belief tasks?

“…For example, Siegal et al (2009Siegal et al ( , 2010 have observed that bilingual children between the ages of 3 and 6 have a better conversational understanding than their monolingual peers, as indicated by their greater sensitivity to violations of conversational maxims (i.e. speakers must be informative while avoiding redundancy, and they must speak the truth and be relevant and polite; Grice, 1975).…”