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How does childhood bilingualism and bi-dialectalism affect the interpretation and processing of pragmatic meanings?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2019

Kyriakos Antoniou ,
Alma Veenstra ,
Mikhail Kissine  and
Napoleon Katsos
Kyriakos Antoniou*
Affiliation:
University of Cyprus, Center for Applied Neuroscience Hellenic Open University, School of Humanities
Alma Veenstra
Affiliation:
Université libre de Bruxelles, Center for Research in Linguistics LaDisco University of Cambridge, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
Mikhail Kissine
Affiliation:
Université libre de Bruxelles, Center for Research in Linguistics LaDisco
Napoleon Katsos
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics
*
Address for correspondence: Kyriakos Antoniou, E-mail: antoniou.kyriakos@ucy.ac.cy
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Abstract

Recent research has reported superior socio-communicative skills in bilingual children. We examined the hypothesis of a bilingual pragmatic advantage by testing bilingual, bi-dialectal and monolingual children on the comprehension and processing of various pragmatic meanings: relevance, scalar, contrastive, manner implicatures, novel metaphors and irony. Pragmatic responses were slower than literal responses to control items. Furthermore, children were least accurate with metaphors and irony. Metaphors and irony were also the most difficult to process; for these meanings, pragmatic responses were slower than literal responses to the same critical items. Finally, pragmatic performance positively correlated with working memory. Despite this variation, we found no bilingual or bi-dialectal advantage over monolinguals in pragmatic responses or speed of pragmatic processing. This was also true despite bilinguals’ and bi-dialectals’ lower vocabularies as measured by formal tests. We conclude that bilingual children exhibit monolingual-like pragmatic interpretation, despite their often-reported weaker language knowledge in the target language.

Keywords

pragmatic processingpragmatic interpretationimplicaturebi-dialectalismbilingualism
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 186 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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