Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2010 Feb 3;5(2):e9004. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009004.
Although bilingualism is prevalent throughout the world, little is known about the extent to which it influences children's conversational understanding. Our investigation involved children aged 3-6 years exposed to one or more of four major languages: English, German, Italian, and Japanese. In two experiments, we examined the children's ability to identify responses to questions as violations of conversational maxims (to be informative and avoid redundancy, to speak the truth, be relevant, and be polite).
In Experiment 1, with increasing age, children showed greater sensitivity to maxim violations. Children in Italy who were bilingual in German and Italian (with German as the dominant language L1) significantly outperformed Italian monolinguals. In Experiment 2, children in England who were bilingual in English and Japanese (with English as L1) significantly outperformed Japanese monolinguals in Japan with vocabulary age partialled out.
As the monolingual and bilingual groups had a similar family SES background (Experiment 1) and similar family cultural identity (Experiment 2), these results point to a specific role for early bilingualism in accentuating children's developing ability to appreciate effective communicative responses.
尽管双语现象在全球范围内普遍存在，但对于双语对儿童会话理解的影响程度，我们知之甚少。我们的研究涉及 3 至 6 岁的儿童，他们接触过四种主要语言中的一种或多种：英语、德语、意大利语和日语。在两项实验中，我们考察了儿童识别对问题的回答是否违反会话准则（信息丰富、避免冗余、讲真话、相关和礼貌）的能力。
在实验 1 中，随着年龄的增长，儿童对准则违反的敏感性逐渐增强。在意大利，同时掌握德语和意大利语的双语儿童（以德语为主要语言 L1）显著优于意大利语单语儿童。在实验 2 中，在英国，同时掌握英语和日语的双语儿童（以英语为 L1）在词汇年龄部分排除后，在日本显著优于日语单语儿童。
由于单语和双语组具有相似的家庭社会经济地位（实验 1）和相似的家庭文化认同（实验 2），这些结果表明早期双语对增强儿童发展欣赏有效交际反应的能力具有特定作用。
