Preschoolers’ Use of Mutual Exclusivity and Acceptance of Lexical Overlap in a Bilingual Context

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

Integrative Statement

Mutual exclusivity is a word learning strategy that guides young children to establish one-to-one word-referent mappings (Markman & Wachtel, 1998). However, for bilingual children to be proficient in both languages they speak, they have to learn more than one word for an object, in other words, accept lexical overlap. Previous research has shown that bilingual children use mutual exclusivity to a lesser extent (e.g., Byers-Heinlein & Werker, 2009) and are more likely to accept lexical overlap than their monolingual peers (e.g., Kalashnikova, Mattock & Monaghan, 2015). Findings from other studies also suggest that monolingual and bilingual children have different expectations for how words map onto objects (e.g., Byers-Heinlein, Xu & Chen, 2014; Henderson & Scott, 2015). However, all such studies either did not directly test children’s acceptance of lexical overlap, or lexical overlap tasks only involved one language.
In addressing the limitations of previous studies, the present study investigated whether monolingual (n = 20, Mage = 4.01) and bilingual preschoolers (n = 20, Mage = 3.92) would apply mutual exclusivity and accept lexical overlap differently in a one-language and a two-language context using a touchscreen computer. Children were first taught the name(s) – one in the mutual exclusivity task and two in the lexical overlap task – of one of two novel objects. Then, the children were asked to choose the referent of another novel word in the mutual exclusivity task and that of the just-learnt novel words in the lexical overlap task. Children’s memory of the word-referent pairings was also tested after a 10-minute delay.
Interestingly, the two language groups did not perform differently. Results of the immediate test reveal that the children performed better in the mutual exclusivity than lexical overlap task and were more likely to accept lexical overlap in the two-language condition. Results of the delayed test show that whereas younger children tended to have better memory for words learnt through the application of mutual exclusivity, older children tended to remember better words that were ostensively taught. Comparing performance on the immediate and delayed tests, the children’s performance on the lexical overlap trials improved after the delay, whilst their performance on the mutual exclusivity trials became poorer after the delay, showing better learning for word-referent mappings that they had more exposure to.
These results suggest that preschoolers are sensitive to the linguistic environment around them and can adapt their word learning strategies to cope with the demands of different learning situations. The results also suggest that, in line with the emergentist account of word learning, children may first rely on basic constraints, such as mutual exclusivity, when learning the meanings of new words, and then become increasingly reliant on socio-pragmatic cues as they grow. Finally, the results comparing the fast-mapping and retention trials provided support for children’s ability to learn words through associative learning.

Authors

• Kin Chung Jacky Chan, Lancaster University
  Presenting Author

• Padraic Monaghan, Lancaster University
  Non-Presenting Author