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A bilingual advantage in how children integrate multiple cues to understand a speaker's referential intent*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2014

W. QUIN YOW  and
ELLEN M. MARKMAN
W. QUIN YOW*
Affiliation:
Singapore University of Technology and Design
ELLEN M. MARKMAN
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
Address for correspondence: W. Quin Yow, Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Singapore University of Technology and Design, 20 Dover Drive, Singapore 138682, USAquin@sutd.edu.sg
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Abstract

In everyday communication, speakers make use of a variety of contextual and gestural cues to modulate the meaning of an utterance. Young children have difficulty in integrating multiple communicative cues when some of them have to be interpreted differently depending on other co-occurring cues. However, bilingual children, who regularly experience communicative challenges that demand greater attention and flexibility, may be more adept in integrating multiple cues to understand a speaker's communicative intent. We replicated Nurmsoo and Bloom's (2008) procedure with three-year-old monolingual and bilingual children using a procedure in which they saw two novel objects while the experimenter could see only one. The experimenter looked at the object she could see and said either “There's the [novel-word!]” or “Where's the [novel-word]?”. Compared to monolinguals, bilingual preschoolers were better able to integrate the semantics of “where”, perceptual access of the experimenter, and the nonlinguistic context of the game to successfully differentiate the speaker's communicative intent.

Keywords

pragmaticstheory of mindcommunicative cues
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 2015 , pp. 391 - 399
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

We are grateful to the children and parents who participated and to the teachers and staff of Bing Nursery School. We thank Adrienne Sussman, Suejung Shin, and Hannah Jaycox for their help in this study. Portions of this work were previously presented at the Society for Research in Child Development in Denver (March 2009) and the Cognitive Development Society Conference in San Antonio (October 2009). This work was partially supported by the Tan Kah Kee Postgraduate Scholarship to the first author. We are also grateful to the reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

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