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Bilingual and monolingual children's use of two lexical acquisition heuristics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

William E. Merriman  and
Vesna Kutlesic
William E. Merriman*
Affiliation:
Kent State University
Vesna Kutlesic*
Affiliation:
Kent State University
*
William E. Merriman, Department of Psychology, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242
William E. Merriman, Department of Psychology, Kent State University, Kent, OH 44242
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Abstract

Children's heuristics for word learning have been the focus of much research, but little is known about bilinguals' and monolinguals' comparative use of them. In this study, 36 Serbian/ English bilinguals and 42 English monolinguals, who were between 5 and 8 years old and lived in the same neighborhoods in the United States, received a successive name training assessment of two heuristics: criterial use of highlighted features and preservation of mutual exclusivity. Older children employed both heuristics more often than younger ones. Monolinguals were more likely than bilinguals to interpret a highlighted feature as a necessary condition for applying a new English object name, but the groups did not differ in their tendency to maintain mutual exclusivity between the extensions of two novel English labels.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 1993 , pp. 229 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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