Analogical Reasoning in 4 to 6 Years old Monolingual and Bilingual Children

• In Event: Executive Functioning and Metacognitive Skills as ‘Motor and Consequence’ of Early Dual Language Learning

Abstract

Analogical reasoning is defined as a domain-general ability to understand relational similarities between situations (e.g., ‘a nest is to a bird what a kennel is to a dog’). This non-specific competence shares learning mechanisms with executive functioning (inhibition, attention) (Thibaut et al., 2010a, see Figure 1) and language development, especially with the acquisition of morphosyntax (Goldwater et al., 2011). Gentner & Ratterman (1991) pointed out a so-called “relational shift”, around the age of 5 years, corresponding to the moment when children start favoring relational choices over others in a picture choice paradigm.
To our knowledge, this capacity has not been investigated specifically in bilingual children. Thus, we will explore if there was any difference in analogical reasoning between monolingual and bilingual children, as well as a relational shift with age. In fact, one may expect a bilingual advantage on the analogy task, since some studies showed increased abilities for inhibition and flexibility in bilinguals (e.g., Adesope et al. 2010, Bialystok et al., 2010), which could lead them to access analogical reasoning better and sooner than monolinguals. We will also analyze associations with morphosyntax development in these populations.

Thus, the current study set out to compare monolingual and bilingual children’s analogical reasoning in a non-verbal task, to avoid possible confounding effects of different language exposure. To be as language-fair as possible, the task was run in the child’s dominant language, with extremely short and simple instructions, avoiding any lexical or syntactic complexity. Children had to choose a picture (D) among three distractors in a A :B ::C :? design, to complete a C:D pair that mirrored relations between A:B (see Figure 1).
Syntax score was calculated based on a sentence comprehension task, where children heard a sentence and pointed at one picture among four. We also included the “Categories” task of the SON-R test (Tellegen et. al, 2009) as a measure for non-verbal reasoning.
Typically developing children participated, between 42 to 72 months old (m=62 months), as part of a larger longitudinal study. A hundred seventy-seven children were German or French-speaking monolinguals and 83 were bilinguals, learning Italian or Turkish at home, in German- or French-speaking societies.

Figure 2 shows mean correct choices by linguistic status. In a linear regression, we found evidence of a positive association of being bilingual (b=0.67 and p=.01), being older (b=0.04, p=.01) and having a higher non-verbal reasoning level (b=0.14 and p=.00) on the analogy scores, thus confirming our hypothesis of a bilingual advantage. A linear effect of age did not support the claim of a relational shift. Partial correlations with “age” as a controlled factor also confirmed the relation between morphosyntax and analogy (corr=.22, p < .00).
We will discuss the impact of these results in light of the specificity of bilingual cognitive and language development, emphasizing the roles of inhibition and language. Indeed, a better understanding of the predictive effects between analogical reasoning, language and executive functions in a language-fair reasoning task may be of major interest for bilingual children language assessment.

Group Authors

Belogi, S., Volpin, L., & Skoruppa, K.

Authors

• Solène Marie Belogi, Université de Neuchâtel
  Presenting Author

• Katrin Skoruppa