The Acquisition of Word Learning Strategies by Monolingual and Bilingual Toddlers

• In Event: 2-095 - Word Learning in Monolingual and Bilingual Children: A Developmental Story of the Mutual Exclusivity Bias

Integrative Statement

The ability to disambiguate the meaning of unfamiliar words presented in ambiguous naming situations is well document among young infants and children (e.g., Diesendruck & Markson, 2001; Liittschwager & Markman, 1994; Markman, Wasow, & Hansen, 2003). This ability is attributed to several word-learning constraints, principles, or assumptions that children employ during the early stages of lexical acquisition (Markman, 1990). One of these assumptions is mutual exclusivity (ME), which is proposed to guide children to assume that there are one-to-one correspondences between words and their referents. While ME may be a useful default assumption, it does not apply to all word-learning situations, especially those faced by bilingual children who learn more than one label for most referents in their environment. In this talk, two experiments will be presented that assessed monolingual and bilingual toddler’s reliance on ME in ambiguous naming situations, and their ability to suspend ME to acquire two words for the same referent.
Experiment 1 assessed the emergence and use of ME to both disambiguate and retain the meanings of novel words across development in 18-month-old monolingual and bilingual children (N = 58) and in a sub-group of these children again at 24 months of age (N = 32). Children completed a looking while listening paradigm, which measured their ability to map two novel words to two novel referents via ME and to recognise the referents of these labels after a brief delay. Results showed that both monolinguals and bilinguals employed ME for mapping novel labels to their referents to a similar extent at 18- and 24-months. At 18-months, there were also no differences in novel word retention between monolingual and bilingual children. However, at 24 months, only monolinguals showed successful retention of the novel labels, but bilingual children did not.
Experiment 2 assessed monolingual and bilingual 30-month-old children’s (N = 68) ability to suspend ME and learn overlapping labels. Children completed an interactive paradigm in which they were presented with two labels for one unfamiliar referent. Children’s ability to accept and retain the two labels was assessed as well as its relation to children’s lexical knowledge in one or two languages (receptive vocabulary size in English for monolinguals and in English and the additional language for bilinguals). Results showed that monolingual and bilingual children did not differ significantly in their performance in the lexical overlap task. However, English receptive vocabulary size was a significant predictor of performance in this task for monolingual children, whereby children with larger vocabularies were more successful at accepting lexical overlap. In the case of bilinguals, lexical overlap performance was not related to any measure of lexical knowledge. These findings indicate that young monolingual and bilingual children may have access to similar default biases and general learning mechanisms, but the development of these biases into word-learning strategies is shaped by children’s individual language exposure and experience with language use.

Author

• Marina Kalashnikova, Basque Center for Cognition, Brain and Language
  Presenting Author