Differences between Spanish monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children in their calculation of entailment-based scalar implicatures

Abstract

In this paper, we extend investigations of the possible effects of cross-linguistic influence at the pragmatics-syntax interface (Hulk & Müller 2000; Müller & Hulk 2001; Serratrice, Sorace & Paoli 2004), by presenting two experiments designed to probe how Spanish monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual preschool-age children approach the ‘some, but not all’ scalar implicature (SI) associated with algunos (‘some’). We compare algunos and unos (also a ‘some’ indefinite, but one that is not context-linked and does not induce an SI), and algunos and todos (the universal quantifier ‘every/all’). The performance of the children is compared to fluent adult Spanish heritage speakers. Experiment 1 is a variation of Noveck’s (2001) statement evaluation task, also replicated by Guasti et al. (2005). Experiment 2 is a forced-choice picture selection task. Results demonstrate that adults were the only group to consistently calculate the SI associated with algunos – a finding that was expected to some extent, given that our tasks were stripped of the contextual support that could benefit children’s pragmatic reasoning. While bilingual and monolingual children displayed comparable performance across tasks, bilinguals in Experiment 2 appeared to experience difficulty with judgments related to todos – a pattern we attribute (in light of independent findings) to the cognitive overload in the task, not the lexical entry of this quantifier. We conclude that young monolingual and bilingual children confront the same challenges when called upon to deploy pragmatic skills in a discourse context.This article is part of the special collection: Acquisition of Quantification

Cross-linguistic influence in simultaneous and early sequential bilingual children: a meta-analysis

“…Finally, we recommend conducting additional studies on cross-linguistic influence in children's comprehension. The majority of studies in our dataset were concerned with elicit production or judgement tasks and only a few studies concerned comprehension (Nicoladis, 2003; Serratrice, 2007; Syrett, Lingwall, Perez-Cortes, Austin, Sánchez, Baker, Germak & Arias-Amaya, 2017; van Koert, Koeneman, Hulk & Weerman, 2016). It is therefore unclear whether the average effect sizes attested in our meta-analysis apply to cross-linguistic influence in comprehension as well.…”

Bilingual Children’s Use of the ‘Maximize Presupposition’ Principle

“…2. There is no robust evidence that suggests a multilingual advantage in the comprehension of scalar implicatures (Antoniou et al 2013;Syrett et al 2017;Antoniou & Katsos 2017;Dupuy, Stateva et al 2019).…”