Bilingualism accentuates children's conversational understanding.
BACKGROUND
Although bilingualism is prevalent throughout the world, little is known about the extent to which it influences children's conversational understanding. Our investigation involved children aged 3-6 years exposed to one or more of four major languages: English, German, Italian, and Japanese. In two experiments, we examined the children's ability to identify responses to questions as violations of conversational maxims (to be informative and avoid redundancy, to speak the truth, be relevant, and be polite).


RESULTS
In Experiment 1, with increasing age, children showed greater sensitivity to maxim violations. Children in Italy who were bilingual in German and Italian (with German as the dominant language L1) significantly outperformed Italian monolinguals. In Experiment 2, children in England who were bilingual in English and Japanese (with English as L1) significantly outperformed Japanese monolinguals in Japan with vocabulary age partialled out.


CONCLUSIONS
As the monolingual and bilingual groups had a similar family SES background (Experiment 1) and similar family cultural identity (Experiment 2), these results point to a specific role for early bilingualism in accentuating children's developing ability to appreciate effective communicative responses.
Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom. M.Siegal@Sheffield.ac.uk
Michael
M
Siegal
Luca
L
Surian
Ayumi
A
Matsuo
Alessandra
A
Geraci
Laura
L
Iozzi
Yuko
Y
Okumura
Shoji
S
Itakura
D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003142:Communication; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007807:Language Tests; D019303:Multilingualism; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D014825:Vocabulary