title: More Limitations to Monolingualism: Bilinguals Outperform Monolinguals in Implicit Word Learning.
abstract: To succeed at cross-situational word learning, learners must infer word-object mappings by attending to the statistical co-occurrences of novel objects and labels across multiple encounters. While past studies have investigated this as a learning mechanism for infants and monolingual adults, bilinguals' cross-situational word learning abilities have yet to be tested. Here, we compared monolinguals' and bilinguals' performance on a cross-situational word learning paradigm that featured phonologically distinct word pairs (e.g., BON-DEET) and phonologically similar word pairs that varied by a single consonant or vowel segment (e.g., BON-TON, DEET-DIT, respectively). Both groups learned the novel word-referent mappings, providing evidence that cross-situational word learning is a learning strategy also available to bilingual adults. Furthermore, bilinguals were overall more accurate than monolinguals. This supports that bilingualism fosters a wide range of cognitive advantages that may benefit implicit word learning. Additionally, response patterns to the different trial types revealed a relative difficulty for vowel minimal pairs than consonant minimal pairs, replicating the pattern found in monolinguals by Escudero et al. (2016) in a different English accent. Specifically, all participants failed to learn vowel contrasts differentiated by vowel height. We discuss evidence for this bilingual advantage as a language-specific or general advantage.
authors: The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, PenrithNSW, Australia; Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian Research Council, CanberraACT, Australia.
authors: Paola
authors: P
authors: Escudero
authors: The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, PenrithNSW, Australia; Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Australian Research Council, CanberraACT, Australia.
authors: Karen E
authors: KE
authors: Mulak
authors: Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore.
authors: Charlene S L
authors: CS
authors: Fu
authors: Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore.
authors: Leher
authors: L
authors: Singh
keywords: bilingual advantage; implicit word learning; minimal pairs; monolinguals; phonetic detail; simultaneous bilinguals