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Bilingualism, conversational understanding and cognitive development| old_uid | 2095 |
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| title | Bilingualism, conversational understanding and cognitive development |
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| start_date | 2007/01/22 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h30 |
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| online | no |
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| details | Horaire inhabituel |
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| summary | One of the most central and enduring issues in cognitive science concerns the relation between language and cognition. Of particular concern is the impact of language on cognitive development. Children are exposed to a range of language environments. Some children as such deaf children with hearing parents may not be exposed to a language until later whereas children with one parent who is English- speaking and the other who is a speaker of a different language are exposed from birth to more than one language. However, the general effects of the timing and nature of language input on children’s cognitive development are not well understood. Therefore, the aim of the work reported here was to test the hypothesis that bilingualism confers an advantage on cognitive development in terms of children’s knowledge of the beliefs of others and their understanding of the implications of messages as intended by speakers in conversation. We report a study of children aged 4-6 years who were either monolingual in Japanese or bilingual in Japanese and English as shown by their performance on picture vocabulary tests. The children were tested on a variety of measures, including executive functioning, scalar implicature, garden path sentence and theory of mind tasks. Though equivalent in their level of Japanese, the bilingual children excelled on most measures compared with the monolinguals - a difference that increased with age. |
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| responsibles | Copley |
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