Differences in word learning in children: Bilingualism or linguistic experience?
Data
2021Egilea
Borragan, Maria
de Bruin, Angela
Havas, Viktoria
de Diego-Balaguer, Ruth
Vulchanova, Mila Dimitrova
Vulchanov, Valentin
Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni
Borragan, M., De Bruin, A., Havas, V., De Diego-Balaguer, R., Vulchanova, M., Vulchanov, V., & Duñabeitia, J. (2021). Differences in word learning in children: Bilingualism or linguistic experience? Applied Psycholinguistics, 42(2), 345-366. doi:10.1017/S0142716420000594
Laburpena
The current study examines how monolingual children and bilingual children with languages
that are orthotactically similar and dissimilar learn novel words depending on their
characteristics. We contrasted word learning for words that violate or respect the orthotactic
legality of bilinguals’ languages investigating the impact of the similarity between
those two languages. In Experiment 1, three groups of children around the age of 12 were
tested: monolinguals, Spanish–Basque bilinguals (orthotactically dissimilar languages),
and Spanish–Catalan bilinguals (orthotactically similar languages). After an initial
word-learning phase, they were tested in a recognition task. While Spanish monolinguals
and Spanish–Catalan bilingual children recognized illegal words worse than legal words,
Spanish–Basque bilingual children showed equal performance in learning illegal and legal
patterns. In Experiment 2, a replication study was conducted with two new groups of
Spanish–Basque children (one group with high Basque proficiency and one group with
a lower proficiency) and results indicated that the effects were not driven by the proficiency
in the second language, as a similar performance on legal and illegal patterns was observed
in both groups. These findings suggest that word learning is not affected by bilingualism as
such, but rather depends on the specific language combinations spoken by the bilinguals.