Institut des Sciences Logopédiques, Maison des Sciences du Langage et de la Communication, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Switzerland.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2022 Sep 12;65(9):3531-3538. doi: 10.1044/2022_JSLHR-21-00528. Epub 2022 Aug 31.
Both monolingual and bilingual children use learning constraints and heuristics to acquire new words from their environment. Overall, fast mapping abilities seem to be similar in both populations, but monolinguals rely more than bilinguals on the mutual exclusivity strategy. Our study probes the robustness of these results in a large group of children learning different language combinations, with a newly devised language-fair task that relies as little as possible on previous linguistic knowledge, in order to avoid disadvantaging bilingual children.
We tested 138 3- to 5-year-old mono- and bilingual children in their dominant language (German, French, Italian, or Turkish) in a computerized task starting with a fast mapping phase, followed by a mutual exclusivity phase, using only invented nonobjects and nonwords.
As hypothesized, monolingual and bilingual children showed similar results during the initial fast mapping stage, but monolinguals relied significantly more on the mutual exclusivity strategy than their bilingual peers.
The language-fair design of our task supports the idea that differences in mutual exclusivity strategy use between mono- and bilingual children really stem from their specific linguistic background, and not from potential familiarity differences with respect to the test words. We discuss the implications of our results for bilingual language assessment in clinical or educational contexts.
单语和双语儿童都利用学习约束和启发式方法从环境中获取新词。总体而言，快速映射能力似乎在这两种人群中都相似，但单语儿童比双语儿童更依赖互斥策略。我们的研究在一大群学习不同语言组合的儿童中探究了这些结果的稳健性，使用了一种新设计的语言公平任务，该任务尽可能少地依赖先前的语言知识，以避免使双语儿童处于不利地位。
我们在计算机化任务中测试了 138 名 3 至 5 岁的单语和双语儿童，他们的母语（德语、法语、意大利语或土耳其语），该任务首先是快速映射阶段，然后是互斥性阶段，仅使用虚构的非物体和非单词。
正如假设的那样，单语和双语儿童在初始快速映射阶段表现出相似的结果，但单语儿童比双语儿童更依赖互斥性策略。
我们任务的语言公平设计支持这样一种观点，即单语和双语儿童在互斥性策略使用方面的差异确实源于他们特定的语言背景，而不是源于对测试词的潜在熟悉度差异。我们讨论了我们的结果对双语语言评估在临床或教育环境中的意义。
