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MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL CHILDREN’S INTEGRATION OF
MULTIPLE CUES TO UNDERSTAND A SPEAKER’S REFERENTIAL INTENT –
THE ROLE OF EXPERIENCE IN COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY
AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES
OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Wei Quin Yow
July 2010
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/wz095zd2776
© 2010 by Wei Quin Yow. All Rights Reserved.
Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
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I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Ellen Markman, Primary Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Lera Boroditsky
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequatein scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Carol Dweck
Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies.
Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education
This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file inUniversity Archives.
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ABSTRACT
Children growing up in a dual-language environment have to constantly
monitor the dynamic communicative context to determine what the speaker is trying to
say and how to respond appropriately. Such self-generated efforts to monitor
speakers’ communicative needs may heighten children’s sensitivity to and allow them
to make better use of communicative cues to figure out a speaker’s referential intent.
Chapter 1 of this paper reviews the current models of bilingualism and literature on
the impact of growing up bilingual, including benefits to the cognitive and
communicative development of children. Chapter 2 presents a series of studies to
examine how the experience of growing up bilingual may foster children’s ability to
integrate multiple cues to understand a speaker’s referential intent, and how the
experience of a communication breakdown of a bilingual nature may increase
children’s sensitivity to communicative cues. Overall, results provide evidence that
growing up in a bilingual environment facilitates a more sophisticated understanding
of the demands in a communicative context and support the hypothesis that children’s
self-generated efforts to cope with communicative challenges heighten their sensitivity
to a speaker’s communicative intent and foster their cognitive and linguistic
development.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I want to express my immense gratitude to my advisor,
Ellen Markman. I have worked with many different people in the past (corporate
bosses and professors), and Ellen is truly an exceptional mentor. She is my greatest
source of inspiration in pursuing the highest quality research in psychology. Thank
you, Ellen, for your professional advice, intellectual guidance, and unwavering
support in both academic and personal aspects of my life at Stanford.
I cannot have a more wonderful group of committee members: Carol Dweck,
Lera Boroditsky, Anthony Wagner, and Kenji Hakuta. Your encouraging feedback
and comments are exceptionally helpful in guiding my dissertation research. Thank
you, Anthony, in particular, for your guidance and support through my years at
Stanford.
This dissertation will not be possible without the support of my fellow
graduate students and lab members, Allison Master, Luke Butler, Sarah Gripshover,
Taylor Holubar, and Carissa Romero. Thank you Allison, especially, for always being
there for me when I needed you, be it a listening ear, insights about research, or
occasional personal assistance. Thank you Frances Chen, too, for the continuing
support and help even after you have graduated from Stanford. I am grateful to many
of my research assistants who have helped in various parts of this dissertation work,
for without them, none of this awesome research would be available, particularly
Hannah Jaycox, Jake Wachtel, Holly Rogers and Adrienne Sussman. I am also
grateful to the children and parents who participated in my research, and to the
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teachers and staff of Bing Nursery School. I am thankful to many staff from the
Psychology Department, especially Maureen Sullivan and Beth McKeown for your
wonderful assistance and support throughout the years. I am thankful too, to the Tan
Kah Kee Postgraduate Scholarship and the Stanford Graduate Research Opportunity
Fund, for their financial support towards my dissertation research.
Last but not least, to Angie and Zoe, whose smile, laughter, hugs and kisses
have given me unquantifiable amount of strength and determination to complete this
journey, and to my indispensable family network: Dad (Jin Yan), Mom (Chue Chun),
Dad-in-law (Siew Jin), Mom-in-law (Gui Keok), Yi Pin, Wei Meng and Wei Chui.
Life is not the same without you all.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1 Introduction……………………………………………………... 1
Bilingual Language Representation and Processing. …… 5
Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism………………………. 13
Sensitivity to Socio-Communicative Cues……………… 37
Integrating Multiple Cues and Maintaining Communicative
Effectiveness………………………………..………... 54
Chapter 2 Present Research……………………………………………. 65
Study 1…………………………………………………… 65
Study 2…………………………………………………. 74
Study 3…………………………………………………. 79
Study 4…………………………………………………. 86
Study 5…………………………………………………. 98
Chapter 3 General Discussion………………………………………………. 112
Summary of Findings…………………………………… 112
Self-generated Efforts to Maintain Communicative
Effectiveness…………………………..……………. 115
Conclusions………………………………………………. 116
Chapter 4 References………………………………………………………… 120
Appendices……………………………………………….. 120
List of References…………………………………………. 124
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LIST OF TABLES
Table 1 Mean scores and standard deviations (in parentheses) of Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), Digit-Span task (DS), and Day-Night task (DN) in Study 1…………………………….……………….. 71
Table 2 Means and standard deviations of correct responses (out of 2) in Study
1 and 2……………………….……………………….…..…. 73 Table 3 Mean scores and standard deviations (in parentheses) of Peabody
Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), Digit-Span task (DS), and Day-Night task (DN) in Study 3……………………………………..…. 83
Table 4 Means and standard deviations of correct responses (out of 2) in Study
3………………………….……………….………………… 85 Table 5 Mean scores and standard deviations (in parentheses) of Peabody
Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), Digit-Span task (DS), and Day-Night task (DN) in Study 4…………………………………..……. 91
Table 6 Means and standard deviations of 1st-mentioned character responses
(out of 4) in Study 4…….………………………………….... 94 Table 7 Means and standard deviations (in parentheses) of correct responses
(out of 2) in Study 5…………………………….…………... 107
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1 Screenshots from Study 1………………………………………… 67 Figure 2 Screenshots from Study 2………………………………………… 76 Figure 3 Screenshots from video clips (Study 3)…………………………. 81 Figure 4 Screenshots from Study 4………………………………………... 89 Figure 5 Set-up of Study 5 Part One……..………………………………… 100 Figure 6 Set-up of Study 5 Part Two.………………………..…..………… 101 Figure 7 Schematic representation of the four types of test trials in Study 5
Part Two………………………………………………..………… 102
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
One in three people in the world regularly uses multiple languages in everyday
life (Wei, 2000) and more than half of the world’s population is proficient in two or
more languages (Bhatia & Ritchie, 2004). For example, in Europe, nearly 50% of the
27-bloc’s citizens are capable of speaking at least two languages. It is projected that
in the European Union about one-third of the urban population under 35 will soon
consist of ethnic minorities with a language background different than that of the
majority (Extra & Yagmur, 2004; Romaine, 2004). Findings from the 2000 census
confirm that the U.S. has a fast-growing population that speaks English at home less
frequently, with California leading the way. The U.S. Department of Education
estimates that 8.4% of children in grades K-12 are English Language Learners (ELLs),
representing a 79% increase from the previous decade (Zehler et al., 2003). In
California, by the year 2035, it is expected that over 50% of children enrolled in
kindergarten will have grown up speaking a language other than English (García,
McLaughlin, Spodek, & Saracho, 1995).
Given the growing population of people who speak more than one language in
the world, it is not surprising that the number of research studies dedicated to the study
of bilingualism has also increased dramatically over the past two decades (Meisel,
2004). Much research on childhood bilingualism has been done to understand how
bilinguals represent and process different languages. They seek to understand the
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architecture of the bilingual lexicon, in particular, how the lexicons interact with each
other in terms of conceptual representations of words (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002;
Grosjean, 1988, 1997; Hernandez, Li, & MacWhinney, 2005; Kroll & Stewart, 1994;
Van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998). Others seek to examine how words are
accessed and how language is processed in real-time (Kolers, 1963; McCormack, 1977;
Rodriguez-Fornells, Rotte, Heinze, Nösselt, & Munte, 2002; Spivey & Marian, 1999).
There also exists an abundant amount of bilingual research that focuses on the
acquisition of literacy of bilingual children, such as phonological awareness, reading
and writing (Cisero & Royer, 1995; Geva & Wade-Woolley, 1998; Haynes & Carr,
1990; Sulzby, 1986; Teale, 1986). In addition, there is a solid representation of work
done investigating the cognitive effects of bilingualism (Bialystok & Codd, 1997;
Bialystok & Majumder, 1998; Bialystok, 1999; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008).
While the vast research on childhood bilingualism to date focuses on language
acquisition and its cognitive effects, little is known about the interplay between the
socio-cognitive and communicative development in bilingual children. We know that
children use a range of sources of information to help them learn about the world. One
important source of information is from people around them. Observing the behavior
of others and learning about the world through them is an important form of learning
(cf. Tomasello, 2004). However, interpreting the information provided by other social
beings may be more than straightforward. For example, a point from a speaker could
mean a direct reference to an object, a particular location, or a command for an action
to be performed (e.g. Camaioni, 1993; Goodhart & Baron-Cohen, 1993; Sodian &
Thoermer, 2004; Tomasello, Carpenter, & Liszkowski, 2007). Similarly, a gaze from
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a speaker could mean a direct reference to an object or an indication of desire and
wants (e.g. Lee, Eskritt, Symons, & Muir, 1998; Brooks & Meltzoff, 2002; for a
review, see Kleinke, 1986, and Rutter, 1984). In addition, an utterance said in a tone of
voice that is inconsistent with its contents may indicate pretense, sarcasm or a genuine
confusion (e.g. Reissland & Snow, 1996; Clark, 1994; Kreuz & Roberts, 1995;
Morton & Trehub, 2001). Hence, it is critical that children look beyond a single
aspect of communication to understand the speaker’s intent and learn how to integrate
multiple cues provided by the interlocutors and their social-linguistic environment to
function effectively in the social world (Shatz, 2007).
How would the experience of growing up in a linguistically varied
environment impact on children’s socio-cognitive and communicative development?
Growing up in a bilingual environment presents young children with unique
communicative challenges beyond those monolingual children have to cope with.
Monolingual and bilingual children alike must learn to monitor and integrate different
sources of information to communicate successfully and avoid breakdowns in
communication (e.g. Baldwin, 1995; Hollich, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2000;
Tomasello, 2003). But bilingual children face an additional challenge in
communication when, for example, an adult speaker switches to a language a bilingual
child does not understand, or when a bilingual child responds in a language that an
adult speaker does not speak. Growing up in a bilingual environment requires
bilingual children to understand interpersonal communication in a way that exceeds
the requirements for monolingual communication. For example, bilingual children
need to be more active in monitoring the dynamic communicative situation, in part, to
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determine what language a given speaker is using, what the speaker is referring to, and
how to respond appropriately. Lanza (1997, 2001) proposed that bilingual children’s
understanding of appropriate language choices arises from similar socialization
processes of language use as those shown to influence the development of
communication skills in children (Dopke, 1992). Hence, the experience of growing
up in a bilingual environment may impact on children’s communicative competence in
understanding social interactions. Bilingual children may be pragmatically more
skilled in understanding a speaker’s intent, especially since “they are exposed to a
greater wealth of linguistic information and conversational experience than are
monolingual children” (Siegal & Surian, 2007, p.309).
In this chapter, I will first provide background research about language
representation and processing in bilinguals. Then, I will review past research on the
cognitive benefits of bilingualism, as a first step to understanding how learning an
additional language simultaneously would affect our cognitive functioning. Finally, I
will present recent research on how growing up in a linguistically varied environment
may impact on the socio-cognitive and communicative development of children.
Critically, I will argue for the hypothesis that the experience of growing up bilingual
requires practiced efforts to actively monitor the communicative situation. This in
turn fosters the ability of bilingual children to use communicative cues more
effectively than their monolingual peers in understanding a speaker’s referential
intents in various contexts.
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Models of Bilingual Language Representation and Processing
This section reviews the various models of bilingual language representation
with the goal of understanding how bilinguals construct mental representations for
language and concepts and how the two languages are processed.
Bilingual Language Representation
How are multiple languages represented? There are two classic accounts for
the development of multiple language systems. One view is the one-language-one-
mind account, where children start off with a single language system and then proceed
to differentiate into two linguistic systems (Arnberg, 1987; Grosjean, 1982; Leopold,
1970; Saunders, 1982; Vihman, 1985, Volterra & Taeschner, 1978). According to this
model, the differentiation of this competence into discrete linguistic systems is a
developmental milestone that indicates the growth of linguistic knowledge. Evidence
of children’s language mixing is taken as an indication of an undifferentiated repository
of all linguistic knowledge.
There were several challenges to this unitary model of bilingual language
acquisition. The above interpretation of children’s language mixing may in fact be
taken as an analogy of monolingual children’s overextensions of words to refer to
similar objects. Children with two incomplete language systems may well attempt to
exploit their combined resources when specific words or structures are lacking in the
language required for current needs. According to the differentiated view of dual
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language acquisition, children’s language representations are organized to the two
languages but the structure and terms from the other language may be selected if they
have to fill a gap in the language the child is attempting to use. For example, Deuchar
and Quay (2000) listed separate English and Spanish vocabularies for their bilingual
child subject and found that they could make unambiguous attributions when the child
combines lexicon from both vocabularies in a single utterance. Further, Petersen
(1988) found that a bilingual English-Danish child used English morphology with both
English and Danish lexicon, but never mixed Danish morphology and English lexicon.
The authors suggested that since the child’s dominant language was English, the child
used English to adapt the lexical structures in other languages to the syntactic context.
This implied that the child had the ability to distinguish between the languages, since
lexicon was freely mixed in both directions.
Although the above two classic accounts provide a basic framework in
understanding language representations in bilinguals, they can be simplistic considering
the knowledge revealed by contemporary research (e.g. Van Heuven, Dijkstra, &
Grainger, 1998) that offered alternative theoretical options on how the bilingual lexicon
could be organized, which in turn provide different predictions regarding the activation
of words from one or both languages. For example, Word Association model (Potter,
So, von Eckardt, & Feldman, 1984) posits a bidirectional link between the two
languages and another bidirectional link between the first language and conceptual
representations, suggesting that new words from the second language do not have a
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direct link to concepts. Under this model, a child’s needs to access the meaning of a
word in another language will first activate the corresponding word form from the first
language and then access the meaning of the word. Alternatively, Concept Mediation
model posits a link between the second language and conceptual representations, but
no link between the two languages, suggesting that all words in both languages have
direct access to conceptual meaning and that accessing meaning does not involve
translation (Menenti, 2006). Kroll and Stewart (1994) proposed the Revised
Hierarchical Model (RHM) that suggests bilingual lexicons are bi-directionally
interconnected via lexical links. During second language acquisition, bilinguals learn to
associate every second language word with its first language equivalent, thus forming a
lexical-level association that remains active and strong. Stronger lexical links from the
second to first language reflect the bilingual’s ease of translation since every second
language word is mapped onto its first language equivalent, but not every first language
word is mapped onto its second language equivalent (La Heij, Hooglander, Kerling, &
Van der Velden, 1996; Potter et al., 1984). However, De Groot and colleagues
consistently find the opposite pattern: a processing speed advantage for forward
translation, especially for low-proficiency second language learners (De Groot & Poot,
1997). These opposing findings may result from differences in stimuli frequency
(Kroll & De Groot, 1997). The high-proficiency bilinguals in Kroll and Stewart (1994)
viewed many low frequency nouns (e.g., dagger, celery), and it is possible that the
advantage for backward translation may have changed with the use of high-frequency
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nouns.
The models of bilingual language representation previously discussed focus on
second language acquisition and assume bilinguals interpret words of their weaker
language through the words of their stronger language. Whether the two language
systems would be represented differently if they were acquired simultaneously has
been rarely considered. To sidestep such shortcomings, other models attempted to
examine changes in dual language processing instead.
Bilingual Language Processing
Recent studies suggest that two languages may be active in parallel regardless
of whether a person is trying to selectively use just one language, and that words from
one language automatically activate phonologically similar words from the other
language (Grainger, 1983; Guttentag, Haith, Goodman, & Hauch, 1984; Hermans &
Lambert, 1998; Van Heuven et al., 1998). The evidence supporting the claim has been
amassed from research using a variety of tasks, including cross-language priming
(Gollan, Forster, & Frost, 1997)), cross-language Stroop interference (Brauer, 1998;
Chen & Ho, 1986), cross-language homograph recognition (Dijkatra, Grainger, & Van
Heuven, 1999), cross-language picture naming (Hermans & Lambert, 1998) and eye-
tracking picture discrimination tasks (Li, 1996; Spivey & Marian, 1999).
The Bilingual Interactive Activation model (BIA) attempts to describe how
written words are identified given findings that bilinguals’ two languages are activated
in parallel and competed for recognition (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). It proposes
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that different levels of processing continuously activate each other based on incoming
information, focusing in particular on how words prime each other within and between
languages. Hence, activation for this model is generally said to be bottom-up starting
from the lowest level (feature) to the highest level (language). One important
contribution of the BIA model, though, is the inclusion of top-down control processes
that modify the response output. According to this model, inhibition does not exist at
the activation (word recognition) level, but rather at the selection level (top-down
inhibition from the other language node).
While the BIA model focuses on bilingual visual word recognition, another
interactive model, the Bilingual Model of Lexical Access (BIMOLA), focuses on
spoken word recognition (Grosjean, 1988, 1997). It consists of three levels of nodes
(features, phonemes, and words) and is characterized by various excitatory and
inhibitory links within and between levels. This model allows for greater bidirectional
activation between levels of processing, and greater inhibition within levels of
processing. It also incorporates a higher level of activation that takes into
consideration contextual information such as the interlocutor’s language mode as well
as semantic and structural information. Grosjean proposed that this simultaneous
independence and interdependence acknowledges (1) bilinguals’ ability to speak in just
one language while simultaneously able to mix it with the other language, and (2)
bilinguals’ inability to prevent interference from the other language. However, the
BIMOLA assumes similar proficiency in both languages such that each language
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influences the other with same strength.
There are also network models that posit that the second language learner
begins learning with a parasitic lexicon, a parasitic phonology, and a parasitic set of
grammatical constructs, and the second language grows out of this parasitic status over
time, relying less on first language translation equivalents and becoming a full language
in its own right when the strength of connections changes with experience
(Competition Model on dual language acquisition (Hernandez et al., 2005) and Self-
Organizing Model of Bilingual Processing model (SOMBIP) (Li & Farkas, 2002) ).
Henceforth, the two languages become open to executive control when a bilingual
engages intentionally in language transfer such as translation or language mixing.
Green (1986, 1998) went beyond the functional architecture of bilingualism to
propose a general-purpose language-processing model in an effort to account for a
variety of language phenomena. According to the model, the representation of two
languages in the bilingual mind is distinct but both languages remain active during any
language use. It is the responsibility of an inhibitory process to suppress the
nonrelevant language and allow the required one to carry out the task. Part of
children’s development in the early years may be in refining this inhibitory control so
that it effectively eliminates intrusions from the unwanted languages. If both languages
are always active, then two factors would determine their combination in children’s
early speech: the need to communicate would compel the child to recruit an alternative
lexicon that is already active when gaps are encountered in the language being used, and
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well-developed inhibitory processes to suppress to nonrelevant language to prevent all
intrusions. This general inhibitory control model of dual language processing has
largely captured the essence of the underlying competing processes of activation
proposed by most models discussed earlier and is largely based on the assumption of
the widely accepted view that the two representational systems for bilingual are both
active even when only one of these systems is being used. Several hypotheses follow:
bilingual would need to shift attention frequently because of rapid monitoring of the
context and efficient switching between representations that are required for fluent
performance in both languages; the problem of managing competing representations
can be handled by general cognitive processes, such as attention, inhibition,
monitoring, and switching. Hence, the need to constantly use these processes in the
management of two language systems may later affect the development of the
executive functioning of bilinguals.
Many of the above models to bilingual language representation and processing
attempt to take into account important linguistic and contextual factors, but they
rarely incorporate sociopragmatic aspects of communication. For example, a bilingual
might decide to choose a word or phrase in a particular language and switch another
word or phrase in the other language later in the same sentence based on various
sociopragmatic factors, such as participants in the conversation, memory of previous
interactions, or simply unable to find the right word or phrase in the previous
language. Indeed, Kasuya (2002) found that bilingual adults follow complex linguistic
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and social rules when navigating interactions with different people, evaluating factors
such as others’ fluency or social status when deciding which language to use. The
Sociopragmatic Psycholinguistic Processing Model (SPPL) (Walters, 2005) attempts
to integrate a psycholinguistic model of bilingual processing that includes social and
pragmatic information in bilingual speech and interaction. According to the model,
there is a range of sociopragmatic information that bilinguals have to integrate to
determine their language choice in their interaction with other speakers. This includes
social identity (individual’s social and bilingual history), context/genre (setting,
participants, genre and topic of conversation), speaker’s intentions (speaker’s wish to
convey a request, a promise, etc.), formulation (lexical formulation based on
pragmatic information and structural features, as well as discourse patterns to handle
relevance, cohesion and sequencing of information), and articulation (speech output).
For a bilingual person, these sociopragmatic aspects (e.g. identity and context) are just
as important in codeswitching as psycholinguistic aspects (e.g. lexical access).
Bilinguals have to regularly retrieve, manage, and process such sociopragmatic
information, in addition to linguistic information, to figure out what language a
speaker is using and how they should respond appropriately. Hence, the increased use
of sociopragmatic information in their regular communication may contribute to
bilinguals’ increased communicative competence in understanding social interactions.
In sum, the above models of bilingual language processing suggest that there
are at least two ways bilingualism may affect general development. The constant
control of two languages to prevent use of irrelevant language may affect the
development of executive control. Similarly, the constant need to process
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sociopragmatic information to navigate a bilingual environment may impact on the
development of communicative competence. However, while many studies, which I
will review later, provided evidence of a bilingual advantage in executive functioning
and sensitivity to the communicative requirements of the context, what remains
largely unknown is how bilingualism may contribute to the development of advanced
communicative skills in understanding a speaker’s intent. My dissertation research
will contribute to this understanding by examining how monolingual and bilingual
children use multiple communicative cues to understand a speaker’s referential intents
in various contexts and how the experience of a communicative challenge (of a
bilingual nature) may spur children to make more effective use of communicative
cues. I will first review research that examines the impact of bilingualism on
executive functioning.
Cognitive Effects of Bilingualism
Due to the fundamental need to inhibit the unwanted language in the daily life
of a bilingual at any given time, and hence the intense practice that comes from using
these functions to control the use of the two language systems, Bialystok (2007)
proposed three hypotheses: 1) bilingual children will develop control over executive
processing earlier than monolinguals, 2) the efficiency in using these executive
processes is sustained in bilinguals through adulthood, and 3) as these executive
processes are known to first decline with normal cognitive aging, lifelong experience
and continued use of these processes for controlling the use of two language systems
will delay their decline for older bilinguals compared to monolinguals. In addition,
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the development of executive control is argued to be related to the development of
representational theory of mind. Children who have strong executive control skills,
such as bilingual children, may have a greater capacity to attribute beliefs, desires and
perceptions as representational. I will briefly examine the evidence of such cognitive
benefits of bilingualism in turn.
Bilingual Children’s Enhanced Cognitive Control
Bialystok (1999) proposed that bilingual children need to routinely pay
attention to abstract dimensions of language that are essentially transparent to
monolingual children. They need to be aware at some level of the language that is
needed in a particular situation or with a particular speaker, and they rarely make
mistakes in selection (De Houwer, 1990; Genesee, 1989; Meisel, 1989). Hence,
bilingual children might differ from monolinguals in the development of either
analysis of representations or control of attention or both.
Several studies have found that bilingual children have an advantage in tasks
that require high levels of control due to the constant switching between languages and
efforts to stop interference from another language in communication (Bialystok &
Majumder, 1998; Bialystok, 1999; Bialystok, 2010; Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008), such
as disambiguating and resolving conflicting information (Bialystok & Martin, 2004;
Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008; Carlson & Meltzoff, 2008) and ignoring misleading
information (Bialystok & Codd, 1997; Bialystok & Shapero, 2005). Even bilingual
infants, as young as 7 months old, show an early gain in cognitive flexibility and
control (Kovacs & Mehler, 2009).
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In a recent study examining inhibitory control of preschoolers, Martin-Rhee
and Bialystok (2008) asked 4-to-5-year-old monolingual and bilingual children to
perform a series of Simon Tasks on a computer. A red or blue square would appear
either on the left or right side of the computer screen and children were to press a left
(or right) button if a red square appeared and a right (or left) button if a blue square
appeared. When the target square appears on the same side of the correct key press, it
is a congruent trial. If the square appears on the opposite side of the correct key press,
it is an incongruent trial. Thus, in an incongruent trial, the child has to inhibit his
response to press the button on the same side of the square and press the button on the
opposite side of the square. The correct performance on the incongruent trials
required a child to ignore the position of the square and focus only on the color of the
stimulus. This additional effort increases the response time in an incongruent trial
compared to a congruent trial and is known as the Simon effect (Simon, 1969).
Martin-Rhee and Bialystok found that bilingual children performed the Simon Task
more rapidly than monolinguals, suggesting that bilingual children were more
advanced than monolinguals in cognitive functioning where they have to selectively
attend to target cues in conflicting situations.
Bialystok and Martin (2004) used the dimensional change card sort task to
examine the effect of bilingualism on cognitive processing with respect to resolving
conflicting information. The task requires children to sort a set of cards by one
dimension and then to re-sort the same cards by a different dimension (Frye, Zelazo,
& Palfai, 1995; Zelazo, Frye, & Rapus, 1996). In a typical dimensional change card
sort task, such as the color-shape game, children are presented cards with either red
16
circles or blue squares printed on it. There are two boxes one with a picture of a red
square and the other a picture of a blue circle. When they play the color game, the
child is to put all the blue pictures in the box with the blue picture on it and all the red
pictures in the box with the red picture on it. At the end of this game, children are told
to switch to the shape game, where they have to place the squares in the box with the
square on it and the circles into the box with the circle on it. The same target pictures
remain on the sorting boxes. Past studies in general found that preschoolers before the
age of five have difficulty sorting the stimulus using the new rule after they switch to
the new game (Frye et al., 1995; Jacques, Zelazo, Kirkham & Semcesen, 1999; Zelazo
& Frye, 1997; Zelazo et al., 1996). Bialystok and Martin (2004) ran a series of similar
dimensional change card sort tasks with a group of monolingual and bilingual 3- and
4-year-old children. They found that the bilingual preschoolers outperformed
monolinguals when the target dimensions were perceptual features of the stimulus,
such as the color-shape game. They argued that in addition to the challenge of
representing higher–order rule that embodies all the lower-order rules, children must
inhibit attention to a dimension that was previously valid and refocus on a different
aspect of the same stimulus. These control demands resemble the processes in which
bilingual children have been shown to excel in, such as code switching, in order to
maintain the use of appropriate languages with different language-speakers. Hence,
they concluded that bilingual children generally have better inhibitory control than
monolingual children.
In a series of eye-tracking studies, Kovacs and Mehler (2009) examined
whether 7-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants could successfully suppress
17
their previous responses (anticipatory looks to visual reward on one side) and redirect
their looks to the visual reward (now on the opposite side). During the pre-switch
phase, infants were presented with either a speech or visual cue followed by a visual
reward that always appeared on the same side of the screen. Infants had to learn that
the cue predicted the appearance of the reward in a specific location. In the post-
switch phase, infants were exposed to a different set of speech or visual cues and the
reward was presented on the opposite side of the screen. Thus, infants had to learn to
redirect their gaze from the previously valid side toward the opposite side of the
screen. They found that while both monolingual and bilingual infants learned to
respond to the cues to anticipate a reward on one side of a screen, only bilingual
infants succeeded in redirecting their anticipatory looks when the cues signaled the
reward on the opposite side. Bilingual infants could rapidly suppress their anticipatory
looks to the original location and learned the new response. Hence, they concluded
that processing two languages during the first months of life leads to a domain-general
enhancement of the cognitive control system well before language production begins.
In addition, Bialystok and Codd (1997) found that bilingual children were
better in ignoring misleading information in problem-solving tasks. Children were
asked to complete two tasks: sharing task, and towers task. In the first task, children
had to divide set of candies between two recipients, agreed that the two sets were
equal, counted one of the sets and then had to infer the number of candies in the other
set without counting. There is no misleading information associated with this task. In
the towers task, children were to build apartment buildings out of blocks and that
every block was one apartment and had one family living in it. The trick was that the
18
blocks were either standard lego blocks or duplo blocks (which were twice as large
than standard blocks). They had to count the blocks to decide which apartment
buildings had more families. The critical test was one where the two blocks consisted
of one lego tower and one duplo tower but the duplo tower was taller even though the
lego tower had more blocks. The misleading information about the height of the tower
created demands for attentional control because the height is irrelevant and must be
ignored. The authors found that there was no difference between the monolingual and
bilingual children in their ability to solve the sharing task but there was a significant
bilingual advantage in the towers task, the one children had to make judgments in the
context of perceptually misleading information. They concluded that the bilingual
children were better able to focus on the relevant information and ignore the
misleading information compared to the monolingual children.
More recently, Bialystok (2010) found that bilingual 6-year-old children were
better than monolinguals in processing complex stimuli that require executive
processing components (such as switching and updating) even when no inhibition
appears to be involved. Children were given a global-local task that demonstrated the
dominance of attending to global configuration rather than compositional detail in
perceiving spatial patterns (Navon, 1977). Children were shown a global stimulus
(either letters like H or S, or shapes like circle or squares) that is constituted from
smaller letters or shapes that are either the same as (congruent trials) or different from
(incongruent trials) the larger letter or shape. The task was to identify either the global
or local stimulus. Global level information was usually processed faster and more
accurately than local information interferes with identification of the local elements
19
(e.g. Colombo, Freeseman, Coldren & Frick, 1995; Dukette & Stiles, 1996; Feeney &
Stiles, 1996; Tada & Stiles, 1996). They found that bilingual children completed the
tasks more rapidly than monolinguals, and this speed advantage was found not only
the conflict conditions (e.g. incongruent trials), but also congruent trials that were not
considered to involve conflict. The authors suggested that in congruent trials, no
inhibition was required, but there were other demands, such as maintaining two
response sets, and switching between trial types in the mixed block, were handled
better by bilinguals. Hence, the authors concluded that bilingual children are
developing control over a broad range of executive processes, not only inhibition and
conflict resolution.
Bilingual Adults’ Sustained Advantage in Cognitive Control
Would bilingualism accord the same advantages found in children to adults
who are at the peak of their attentional and cognitive control abilities? Bialystok,
Craik, and Ruocco (2006) and Bialystok (2006) found small differences in a dual-task
processing and a conflict task respectively between bilingual and monolingual
university students, while Bialystok, Craik, and Ryan (2006) revealed only relatively
modest advantage of bilinguals in comparison to monolinguals in tasks tapping
various components of the executive control system. Recently, more studies have
found a reliable advantage of bilinguals in executive and attentional control
(Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2008; Costa, Hernandez, & Sebastian-Galles, 2008;
Emmorey, Luk, Pyers, & Bialystok, 2008; Bialystok & Feng, 2009).
20
Bialystok, Craik, and Ruocco (2006) had monolingual, unbalanced bilingual
(moderate use of second language) and balanced bilingual adults (Experiment 1)
participated in a dual-task classification study. Participants were required to sort
simultaneously visual and auditory stimuli into two category domains: letters or
number (LN) and animals or musical instruments (AM). The visual stimuli were
presented as images on a computer and participants were to press a button indicating
one of the categories. The auditory task was presented through the computer’s
speakers and participants were to respond verbally to each auditory stimulus. The
condition was called related when both modalities presented the same domain. The
condition was called unrelated when the modalities presented different domains.
Results revealed that bilinguals had the highest scores and the monolinguals with the
lowest scores, and the unbalanced group in between and not different from either of
them, but this difference was found only in the LN visual task (both related and
unrelated). The researchers concluded that there was a bilingual advantage in
inhibitory control but not more skilled in a complex response switching task involving
the AM domain.
Bialystok (2006) used the Simon task to investigate the hypothesis that
bilingualism would boost the performance of certain cognitive control tasks. In the
Simon task, similar to the Martin-Rhee and Bialystok (2008) study with children,
participants were asked to learn a rule that connects each of two stimuli to a response
key. In Bialystok (2006), participants were to complete a square task and an arrow
task. In the square task, they were to press the left key if they see a green square and
the right key if they see a red square. Red and green squares were presented on the
21
screen on either the right or left side of the display, and participants were to respond
correctly as quickly as possible. When the stimulus position and the response key were
on opposite sides, such as a green square on the right side of the screen, it should take
the participants longer to respond to the color of the stimulus. Similarly, in the arrow
task, participants were shown a directional arrow that was presented either on the right
or left side of the computer display. The rule was to press the key showing which way
the arrow is pointing, so participants should be faster to respond when an arrow
appeared on the same screen position as its directional indication than when it
appeared in the opposite position. The difference in response time to resolve the
conflict between the position and response key is the Simon effect. In Bialystok
(2006), monitoring and switching were manipulated in both tasks by creating different
numbers of inter-trial switches that occurred in each block of trials, such that blocks
that contained many inter-trial switches should take consistently longer to perform
than comparable blocks that contained fewer inter-trial switches. A switch trial is one
in which the response is different from that required on the previous trial. The need for
frequent changes in response requires more vigilance and more monitoring, thereby
increasing the general processing demands. Bialystok (2006) found that there were
few differences between the two language groups in their performance on these two
tasks except one condition: bilinguals responded significantly faster than monolinguals
in the most difficult version of the arrows task - the block of trials with many inter-
trial switches. The author concluded that the bilinguals demonstrated their advanced
control in executive processing in the condition with the greatest demand on executive
processing.
22
As part of a study to examine the cognitive effects of bilingualism on aging,
Bialystok, Craik, and Ryan (2006) conducted a task based on the anti-saccade effect
(Munoz, Broughton, Goldring, & Armstrong, 1998; Roberts, Hager, & Heron, 1994).
Like the Simon task, the anti-saccade task measures the ability of participants to
overcome a prepotent response by intentionally applying a rule. It requires participants
to resist the automatic responses to follow gaze direction of eyes in a schematic face
when directed to a flashing object (Friesen & Kingstone, 1998; Zorzi, Mapelli,
Rusconi, & Umilta, 2003). There were two conditions in Bialystok et al. (2006)
study’s: 1) eyes straight – where a schematic face looking straight ahead appeared on
the screen, after which the eyes turned red or green in color, and 2) gaze shift – where
the eyes also shifted direction to ‘gaze’ either left or right when they changed color,
looking either towards or away from the position in which the target would appear. If
the eyes were green, the participant had to press a response key on the same side of the
display as a target asterisk that appeared half a second after the eye color cue, and if
the eyes were red, the participant had to press they key on the opposite side of the
target. In the gaze shift condition, the additional eye gaze cue introduced complexity
to the task. The key assumption was that there is a prepotent tendency to
automatically follow the direction of the eye gaze cue. This second condition should
demand greater intentional resources to overcome a misleading directional cue, since
the green eyes would automatically attracted attention to the side of the correct
response key while the opposite response must be executed when the eyes were red.
Hence, the most difficult combination was when the green eyes looked away from the
target, misleading the participant to the opposite side, or when the red eyes looked
23
towards the target, again directing attention to the incorrect response position. The
authors found an advantage for the bilingual adults in the most difficult condition
only, which was the gaze shift trials where green eyes looked away from the target or
red eyes looked towards the target. Both monolingual and bilingual adults performed
equally in all other conditions. They concluded that there were few processing
differences between monolingual and bilingual young adults on executive control
tasks, but the bilingual advantage in the most difficult conditions suggested that
bilinguals were better in exerting extra controlled efforts when processing demands
increase.
Costa, Hernandez, & Sebastian-Galles (2008) examined whether bilingualism
would aid conflict resolution in a larger domain. They proposed that the constant
control of speech production of two languages in bilingual adults exerts general effects
on their attentional network, which included alerting, orienting and executive control.
They asked monolingual and bilingual speakers to perform a multidimentionality
Attentional Network Task (ANT) developed by Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, and
Posner (2002). The task is a combination of a cue reaction time task (Posner, 1980)
and a flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974). Participants were asked to indicate
whether a central arrow pointed to the right or left. This arrow was presented along
with four flanker arrows, two on each side, pointing to the same (congruent trials) or
different direction (incongruent trials) than the target arrow. Responses should be
slower for incongruent than for congruent trials, reflecting the extra time required to
resolve the conflict between the target stimulus and the irrelevant flanker information.
24
In addition, to incorporate the alerting network, an alerting cue was presented before
the target stimulus. Hence, responses should be faster when the target is preceded by
an alerting cue than when it is not. As for the orienting network, a cue would appear
that signal the position in the screen where the target stimulus would appear, where
responses should be faster when the cue signals the spatial location of the target than
when it did not. The results revealed that bilingual participants were not only faster in
performing the task, but also more efficient in the alerting and executive control
networks. In particular, bilinguals benefited more by the presentation of an alerting
cue, and were also better at resolving conflicting information. The bilinguals
experienced a reduced switching cost between the congruent and incongruent types of
trials compared to monolinguals. The authors concluded that bilingualism indeed
exerts an influence in the attainment of efficient attentional mechanisms by young
adults that are supposed to be at the peak of their attentional capabilities.
Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki and Howerter (2000) proposed that the
executive functioning tasks often used in cognitive studies such as the ones reviewed
earlier are not exactly equivalent in the sense that different executive functions
contribute distinctively to performance on these tasks. They selected multiple tasks
that tap three executive functions separately as frequently postulated in the literature a)
shifting between sets or tasks, b) updating and monitoring of working memory, and c)
inhibition of prepotent responses (p. 54). They found that the three target functions
are distinguishable yet they measure the same underlying executive functioning
ability. But even among the inhibition of prepotent tasks, Friedman and Miyake
(2004) identified three subcomponents for this executive functioning ability: prepotent
25
response inhibition, resistance to response-distractor inhibition, and resistance to
proactive interference. While the studies reviewed earlier showed some modest
evidence of bilingual adults’ enhanced inhibitory control, a wider range of measures
corresponding to various aspects of executive functioning might reveal significant
differences better. In one of my work-in-progress study with college-age adults, I
selected two tasks for each of the three components of inhibitory control as reported
by Friedman and Miyake. Young monolingual and bilingual adults were asked to
complete six different tasks. For “Prepotent” tasks: Go/No-Go and Antisaccade; for
“Distractor” tasks: Stroop and Flanker; and for “Proactive interference” tasks:
Sternberg and Task-switching. The Go/No-Go task (Menon, Adleman, White, Glover,
& Reiss, 2001) involves participants seeing a series of letters and responding with a
key press to every letter except the letter “X” to which they were to withhold response.
The Antisaccade task (Hallett, 1978) involves participants to try to suppress the
reflexive saccade toward a cue that flashes on one side of the computer screen and
instead look in the opposite direction to identify the target. The Stroop task (Stroop,
1935) requires participants to name the color in which color words and neutral letter
strings were printed and not reading the color words. The Flanker task (Eriksen &
Eriksen, 1974) requires participants to identify the direction of a middle arrow
amongst neighboring arrows either pointing to the same or opposite direction as the
middle arrow. The Sternberg task (Sternberg, 2006) presents participants with 4
different letters and after a brief retention period, a probe is presented and participants
have to respond as to whether the probe matches any of the items in the memory set.
The Task-switching task (Monsell, 2003) presents participants with a letter-number
26
pair during each trial and requires participants to either identify whether the number in
the pair is an odd or even number, or whether the letter in the pair is a vowel or
consonant. Preliminary analyses revealed a robust main effect of language group in
reaction times, where bilingual adults were significantly faster than monolinguals
across all the six tasks. There was no significant difference in error rates between the
two language groups. This suggests that bilinguals’ constant experience in switching
between languages and efforts to stop interference from another language in
communication confers an extensive advantage in speed of processing in general
inhibitory control tasks.
Protective Function of Bilingualism in Elderly
Executive processes that include monitoring, attention and control are the first
abilities to decline with normal cognitive ageing, with slower and less efficient control
over these functions as one age (McDowd & Shaw, 2000; Park, 2000; Rabbitt, 1965).
It follows then, that the continuous use of language control and switching by the
bilinguals could delay the decline of these cognitive functions. There are three
studies claiming evidence for this protective effect. The first used the Simon task,
described earlier, where participants were asked to learn a rule that connects each of
two stimuli to a response key, such as pressing the left key if they see a green square
and the right key if they see a red square. The squares could appear on the left or right
side of the screen, creating a congruent effect when the green square appears on the
left and incongruent effect when the green square appears on the right. Bialystok,
Craik, Klein, and Viswanathan (2004) compared the performance of monolingual and
27
bilingual adults between 30 and 80 years old. There were two age groups of
participants: one group between the ages of 30 and 60 years old, and the other 60 years
old and beyond. The authors found that bilinguals in the younger age group were
consistently faster in the task compared to monolinguals of the same age. For those
who were 60 years old and beyond, they showed significant increases in reaction time
for each decade of age. Importantly, the increase in reaction time was slower for
bilinguals, so as age increased, the difference between the monolinguals and bilinguals
widened as well. It appears, therefore, that bilingualism helps reduce the rate in which
these cognitive processes declined. However, the bilingual advantage in the task
reflected an overall speed advantage in both congruent and incongruent trials, even
though they had a significant lower Simon effect. In addition, the monolingual and
bilingual participants were from different countries: monolingual participants were
English speakers from Canada, and bilingual participants were either Tamil–English
bilinguals from India or English-Cantonese bilinguals from Hong Kong. Although
the authors did show that these populations of monolinguals and bilinguals did not
differ in various measures of intelligence, it remains plausible that cultural differences
may have been an important factor affecting the conclusions of the study.
In Bialystok, Craik, and Ryan (2006)’s study discussed earlier, they conducted
an anti-saccade test with both the eyes straight and gaze shift conditions on a group of
participants between 60 and 70 years old, half of whom were bilingual. As was found
with the young adults (described earlier), monolinguals and bilinguals responded just
as fast in the simplest pro-saccade condition - when green eyes looked straight ahead.
However, the bilinguals were significantly faster on the anti-saccade straight eye
28
condition, such that they pressed the key on the opposite side of the display faster than
the monolinguals when the eyes turned red. When the gaze direction was added in the
more complex version of the task, bilinguals were faster than monolinguals in all
related conditions. The authors suggested again that executive control functions had
been protected by the participants’ bilingual experience.
Past research has provided evidence for protection against dementia by
education, occupational status, mentally stimulating leisure activities, and premorbid
intelligence (Fratiglioni, Paillard-Borg, & Winblad, 2004; Staff, Murray, Deary, &
Whalley, 2004; Valenzuela & Sachdev, 2006). Bialystok, Craik, and Freedman
(2007) proposed that the lifelong use of two languages constituted a type of mental
activity that helps protect the onset of dementia, since bilingualism has been
previously shown to enhance cognitive control and attention in children and adults.
Hence, this experience of constant practice in controlling the use of two languages
would further protect elderly from cognitive decline in the context of dementia.
Bialystok et al. (2007) selected 184 patients who were diagnosed with dementia, of
which 51% were bilingual. They found that bilinguals showed symptoms of dementia
4 years later than monolinguals. Additionally, the rate of decline in Mini-Mental State
Examination (MMSE) scores (a questionnaire typically used to screen for cognitive
impairment) over the 4 years following the diagnosis was the same for a subset of
patients in the two groups, suggesting “a shift in onset age with no change in rate of
progression” (p. 459). Despite this impressive finding, one should be cautious about
establishing a strong causal relationship between lifelong bilingualism and onset delay
in dementia. First, the data were gathered retrospectively from clinical records.
29
Second, there was a certain degree of subjectivity in the estimating age of onset of
dementia. Third, there was a risk of potentially delaying the first visit and hence
increasing the age at which the diagnosis was made due to a lack of objectivity on the
part of patients and their families in deciding when to seek help.
Hence, intense practice in controlling the use of two languages may yield
cognitive benefits in terms of early development of executive control abilities in
children, preservation of such advantages through adulthood, and possible provision of
protective effects from cognitive decline in normal aging. Similarly, effects of
executive control in development may have strong impact on the development of
representational theory of mind, such that children who have strong executive control
skills, such as bilingual children, may have a greater capacity to attribute beliefs,
desires and perceptions as representational.
Advanced Development in Representational Theory-of-Mind
It has been argued that the development of executive functioning is strongly
related to the development of representational theory of mind (Carlson & Moses,
2001; Carlson, Moses, & Hix, 1998; Moses, 2001; Moses, Carlson, & Sabbagh, 2004).
Theory of mind (ToM) is an understanding of a person’s own and other individuals’
mental states (e.g. emotion, attention, beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge).
While nonrepresentational ToM appear to occur as young as 2 years old,
representational ToM has been widely shown to develop later around 4-5 years of age
(Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Flavell, 1999; Gopnik & Wellman, 1994).
Nonrepresentational ToM refers to simple conception of emotions, perceptual
30
experience or attention, or even understanding beliefs, thoughts and desires, but they
do not require one to mentally represent them. Representational ToM refers to the
ability to attribute beliefs, desires and perceptions as representational, that is, what we
want, see, or belief is not the thing itself but the thing as represented. Traditionally, 3-
to 4-year-old preschoolers are found to have difficulty in understanding others’
representational mental states. For example, in a classic ToM task that taps into
children’s ability to attribute false belief (to recognize that others can have beliefs that
are wrong), children are told or shown a story where two dolls, Sally and Anne are
playing with a marble (Wimmer & Perner, 1983). The dolls put away a marble in a
box and then Sally leaves. Anne takes the marble out and plays with it again and after
that, puts it away in a different box. Sally returns and the child is then asked where
Sally will look for the marble. Three- to 4-year-old children typically are not able to
answer the question correctly (that Sally will look in the first box where she put the
marble) until about 5 years of age (see Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001, for a
review). To successfully pass the task, a child must be able to understand that other
people’s mental representation of the situation can be different from their own (since
the child knows where the marble is hidden and Sally cannot know since she did not
see it hidden there). In another example that examined children’s ability to
distinguish between appearance and reality, Flavell and his associates have shown that
3-to-4-year-old children have difficulty in representing that a deceptive object (such as
a sponge that looks like a rock) can appear to be one thing when it really is something
else (Flavell, Flavell, and Green, 1983; Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1986). Children
were asked what they believe to be the contents of a box that looked as though it
31
contained candy called “Smarties”, which actually contained pencils (Gopnik &
Astington, 1988). After the child guessed that “Smarties” were inside the box, they
were shown that the box in fact contained pencils. The experimenter then re-closed
the box and asked the child what he or she thought another person, who had not been
shown the true contents of the box would think is inside. The child passes the task if
she responds that the person will think that there are “Smarties” in the box but fails the
task if the child responds that the person will think that the box contains pencils.
Gopnik and Astington (1998) found that children passed this test at around age 4 to 5.
Yet another classic perspective-taking task that requires representational ability is
Piaget’s three mountain problem in which the child views a realistic scale model
containing three toy mountains and then has to choose a photograph corresponding to
what another person sees when looking at it from a different angle (Piaget & Inhelder,
1956). The task requires the child’s ability to choose a presentation of his own view
and views of the experimenter seated opposite and to the side of the child. Children
generally do well at this task around 4-5 years of age (Flavell, Everett, Croft, &
Flavell, 1981; Light & Nix, 1983; Masangkay et al. 1974).
One argument put forward by several researchers is that children’s
development of representational ToM is strongly influenced by their inhibitory control
skills. According to the performance change account, preschoolers fail false-belief
tasks because they fail to inhibit a prepotent tendency to report the salient reality.
Hence as children’s executive skills develop to process these task demands, they begin
able to express their otherwise latent ToM understanding. Training and practice on
tasks that require inhibition actually did improve children’s performance on
32
representational ToM tasks (Kloo & Perner, 2003). Therefore, proponents of the
performance change account of ToM and executive function argued that
developmental progression in domain-general cognitive control would provide crucial
abilities that are necessary for representing other people’s mental states (Flavell &
Miller, 1998; Carlson et al., 1998).
Since these tasks require children to be able to selectively attend to certain
aspects of a representation (such as what Sally could not have known), discard the
distracting or misleading information and make a correct response, it follows then, that
bilingual children who have better inhibitory control would perform better in such
representational ToM tasks than monolingual children. Indeed, Bialystok and Senman
(2004) found that compared with monolingual children, bilingual children performed
better on appearance-reality tasks (see Kyuchukov & Villiers, 2009, for contradictory
evidence). 4- to 5-year-old children were presented four items: a sponge that looked
like a rock, a crayon box that contained Lego blocks, a book shaped like a snowman,
and a bowl with a picture of a happy face on the inside bottom covered with a red
cellophane film. Questions were asked about each object following the procedure
used by Gopnik and Astington (1988). After asking each child to guess the contents
or identity of the objects, the real contents or function were revealed and each child
was asked what he or she thought each of the object was when he or she first saw it,
what he or she thought a puppet who had not seen the hidden contents or functions
think it is, and what he or she thought it really is. The first two questions were
considered as appearance questions because the correct answer requires a description
of the perceptual parts of the object. The last question was represented as a reality
33
question because the correct answer is the real functional identity of the object. While
both monolingual and bilingual children performed equally well in the appearance
questions, bilingual children performed better on the reality questions.
Alternative to the performance change account, the competence change
account postulates that experience with many opportunities to reflect discrepancy
between reality and abstract mental states helps children develop theory-of-mind
abilities (Brown, Donelan-McCall, & Dunn, 1996). Mental states are abstract terms
that are not immediately transparent, especially when they do not correspond with the
true state of affairs (as in the false-belief tasks). In support of this account, Melot and
Angeard (2003) found that brief training on mental state reasoning (such as giving
feedback on performance in the standard representational ToM task) did improve
children’s performance on ToM tasks. Hence, children growing up in a bilingual
environment who often encounter situations where they gain additional experience
about conflicting mental representations could make them more aware of a difference
between their own mental contents and the monolingual others. Hence, this account
would predict that bilinguals’ experience with differing mental contents in language-
switch situations might give them an advantage in solving representational ToM tasks.
In an attempt to disentangle these two accounts, Kovacs (2009) set to compare
3-year-old monolinguals and bilinguals on a standard representational ToM task, a
modified ToM task and a control task that involved physical reasoning. In the
standard ToM task, children were told the story of a boy who puts his chocolate in a
cupboard and in his absence his mother moved it into another cupboard. Children
were asked where the boy would look for the chocolate upon returning to the room.
34
The modified ToM task simulated a language-switch situation that bilinguals often
encounter. The children were given a scenario about a monolingual and bilingual
puppet wanted to buy ice cream. There were two stands, one selling ice cream and the
other sandwiches. The ice-cream vendor then announced in the language that the
monolingual puppet did not speak that he had run out of ice cream but that the
sandwich vendor still had some. The foreign language phrase was translated and
pointed out that the monolingual puppet did not understand what the vendor said.
Children were asked where the monolingual puppet would go to buy ice cream.
Kovacs argued that if the competence change account is true, that language-switch
experience in mental representation is important to the understanding ToM in
bilinguals, bilingual children should selectively performed better in the modified task.
In contrast, if bilinguals have an advantage in ToM tasks due to better executive
functioning, bilingual children should outperform monolinguals on both ToM tasks,
since the inhibitory demands are similar. Kovacs found that bilingual children
showed an advantage on both ToM tasks, suggesting that bilingual children better
ToM skills were associated with their more advanced executive functions gained from
constant monitoring and selecting languages, supporting the performance change
account. However, Kovacs did not adequately explain why the bilingual children had
to selectively perform better in the modified ToM task if the competence change
account is true. In fact, the competence change account would also predict the same
results what she had found: bilingual children should be better in both tasks too, since
both tasks required children to understand and represent the mental states of others.
As the competence change account proposes that the additional experience about
35
conflicting mental representations makes the bilingual children more aware of a
difference between their own mental states and the others, regardless whether the
situation involves a language-switch situation or not, this should indeed predict better
performance in both the modified ToM (where the language-switch situation
resembles the bilingual linguistic environment) and the standard ToM (where it also
requires children to understand the mental states of others).
Hence, part research suggests that children’s inhibitory control skills are
associated with the understanding of representation ToM, such that bilingual children,
who tend to have a higher level of control skills, also tend to perform better in
representation ToM tasks compared to monolingual children. However, bilingual
children’s more advanced ToM development could also be due to their greater
awareness of the ways in which the linguistic knowledge and beliefs of others can
differ from their own (Goetz, 2003). In fact, there should be a clearer distinction
between representational and nonrepresentational ToM development here. Young
children can understand simple emotions, attention, beliefs, thoughts and desires while
not requiring one to mentally represent them (also known as nonrepresentational
theory of mind; Bartsch & Wellman, 1995; Flavell, 1999). Young children can
understand simple desires and intentions, seeing people as connected to existing things
in the world and real events, before they begin to appreciate how other people’s
behavior are affected by their beliefs and desire. For example, research has found that
infants actively and spontaneously track cues (such as pointing, eye gaze, tone of
voice) to others’ referential intentions and use them to draw inferences about word
meanings (Akhtar, 2005; Baldwin et al., 1996; Dunham, Dunham, & Curwin, 1993;
36
Shatz, 1994; Tomasello, 1999). In fact, there is more to theory of mind than the false
belief and appearance-reality distinction tasks (see Bloom & German, 2000, for a
review). For example, young children can attribute goals to others (Csibra, Gergely,
Biro, Koos, & Broackbank, 1999; Gergely, Nadasdy, Csibra, & Biro, 1995;
Woodward, 1998). They can imitate and complete intended actions of others
(Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998; Meltzoff, 1995). They can use eye gaze as a
cue to what someone is attending to when they use a new word (Baldwin, 1991).
They can modify their behavior depending whether or not other people possess a given
belief (O’Neill, 1996). They can identify a speaker’s intention to guide their initial
references about meaning and reference and their subsequent detailed understanding
of word meaning (Jaswal, 2004). Hence, “important developments take place in areas
as diverse as pretence…, self-recognition…, imitation…, empathy…, and internal
state language…. suggesting that infants may have already achieved some general
conceptual insight into the minds of others” (Baldwin & Moses, 1994, p.150).
Hence, while studies that were reviewed earlier largely examined how
bilingual children may have an advanced representational ToM development, little is
known about their nonrepresentational ToM development. Goetz’s suggestion that
bilingual children have a greater sensitivity to sociolinguistic interactions may
postulate an advanced trajectory in the development of ToM understanding in
bilingual children vis-à-vis monolingual children. I propose that bilingual children’s
greater need to maintain communicative effectiveness may require them to better
understand the speaker’s thoughts, intentions and desires not only in a way that is
different from the standard requirements in representational theory of minds tasks, but
37
also at a more sophisticated level than simple understanding of speaker’s emotion,
beliefs and intent, which I will discuss in greater detail in the next section of this
paper.
Sensitivity to Socio-Communicative Cues
Recent studies posit that language learning relies on children’s appreciation of
others’ communicative intentions, their sensitivity to joint visual attention and social
cues, and their desire to imitate (Baldwin, 1995; Brooks & Meltzoff, 2005; Bruner,
1983; Hollich, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2000; Tomasello, 2003; Tomasello &
Farrar, 1986). This preposition has also been extended to early speech learning and
speech production development, such that social interaction is imperative for natural
speech learning in infants (K. Bloom, 1975; K. Bloom & Esposito, 1975; Goldstein,
King, & West, 2003; Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu, 2003). However, the role of socio-pragmatic
cues in language development is much less studied in specific populations of children
who grow up learning two languages or more simultaneously. The next part of this
paper discusses how growing up in a linguistically varied environment may impact on
children’s efforts to maintain communicative effectiveness, which in turn, impact on
children’s understanding and use of communicative cues to speaker’s intentions.
Bilingual Children’s Efforts to Avoid Communication Breakdown
Bilingual children adopt strategies to avoid communication breakdown due to
language choice by constantly monitoring the dynamic communicative situation to
determine what language a given speaker is using, what the speaker is referring to and
38
how to respond appropriately (e.g. Genesee, Boivin, & Nicoladis, 1996; Genesee,
Nicoladis, & Paradis, 1995; Hakuta, 1987; Lanza, 1992; Rontu, 2007). Studies have
shown that young bilingual children can use their languages differentially and
appropriately with familiar (e.g. parents) and unfamiliar interlocutors (Comeau,
Genesee, & Lapaquette, 2003; Genesee et al., 1995; Genesee et al. 1996; Montanari,
2009; Nicholadis & Genesee, 1996; Quay, 1995; Tare & Gelman, 2010). With parents
who each spoke only one language to their child, two-year-old French-English
bilingual children used a higher proportion of the mother’s language with their mother
than with their father, and vice-versa for the father’s language (Genesee et al., 1995).
With strangers whom they had no prior experience, bilingual children demonstrated
similar sensitivity, such as using relatively more of the stranger’s language during a
free play session than they would normally (Genesee et al., 1996). Comeau et al.
(2003) also reported that bilingual children exhibited appropriate language choices
with strangers and matched their rates of language mixing with those of strangers.
2.5-year-old bilingual children were engaged with an unfamiliar interlocutor in three
successive play sessions who varied her rates of mixing from relatively low (15%) to
relatively high (40%) and back to relatively low (15%) again. These bilingual
children were sensitive to the overall rates of mixing of their interlocutor and adapted
their own rates of mixing correspondingly. A turn-by-turn analysis revealed that
bilingual children tended to switch languages in the turn after the interlocutor had
switched languages, and thus were able to achieve a rate of mixing that closely
matched that of the interlocutor. To do this successfully, the bilingual children need to
track language choices of the speakers and then alter their own language choices
39
accordingly. Petitto, Katerelos, Levy, Gauna, Tetrault, and Ferraro (2001) found
similar evidence from children learning oral and sign languages simultaneously. Such
responsiveness to the linguistic preferences or proficiency of unfamiliar speakers
reflected bilingual children’s sensitivity and competence in monitoring the
communicative situation and making on-line adjustments to accommodate the
speaker’s communicative abilities to avoid communication breakdown.
Similarly, Comeau, Genesee, and Mendelson (2007) found that bilingual
children observed speakers for feedback about the appropriateness of their language
choices. In their study, English-French 2-and-3-year-old children played with an
experimenter who used only one language with them. Each time a child used the other
language, the experimenter made requests for clarification. The experimenter also
made requests for clarification when communication breakdowns occurred for other
reasons (e.g. inaudible or incomprehensible utterance). The bilingual children
changed the language they were using whenever they used an inappropriate language
with the experimenter following a request for clarification but almost never changed
languages when the communication breakdown was due to reasons other than
language choice. Hence, these bilingual preschoolers were able to repair
communication breakdown by paying attention to the communicative context and
responded appropriately.
In addition, to maintain communicative effectiveness, one has to be able to
take the perspective of others experiencing communication difficulties. Genesee,
Tucker, and Lambert (1975) found that bilingual children were better than
monolingual children at taking the perspective of a listener into account. They asked
40
both monolingual and bilingual children from kindergarten, grade 1 and grade 2, to
explain a game to two listeners – one blindfolded and the other not. While children in
general gave more information to the blindfolded listener than they did to the sighted
listener, bilingual children significantly gave more information about the physical
aspects of the game to the blindfolded listener than the monolingual children did.
Genesee et al. concluded that bilingual children were better able to take the role of
others experiencing communication difficulties, perceive their needs, and respond to
these needs appropriately. Hence, past research indicated that bilingual children’s
constant efforts to monitor the communicative situation to avoid communication
breakdown could heighten their awareness of the communicative requirements of the
interlocutors. This, in turn, could foster socio-cognitive and linguistic development,
such as conversational skills and the more effective use of both verbal and nonverbal
communicative cues to understand a speaker’s referential intent.
Communication breakdown may also occur when common conversation rules
are violated. For example, Grice (1975, 1989) proposed that understanding of some
specific conversational rules or maxims provide the foundation for pragmatic
competence. These maxims state that speakers should ‘say no more or no less than is
required for the purpose of the (talk) exchange’ (maxims of quantity), ‘tell the truth
and avoid statements for which there is insufficient evidence (maxims of quality)’, ‘be
relevant (maxim of relation)’, and ‘avoid ambiguity, confusion and obscurity (maxims
of manner).’ Grice also discussed the need to invoke other maxims such as ‘be polite’
(maxim of politeness) to represent the nature of effective communication more fully.
41
There are three studies to date that investigated the impact of bilingualism on
children’s understanding and appreciation of messages as intended by speakers in
conversation. The first study examined whether bilingualism influences children’s
ability to use “scalar implicatures” (Siegal, Matsuo, & Pond, 2007). This arises
when a speaker uses a weak member of a scale (e.g. some), he would imply that the
stronger member (e.g. all) is not true (Guasti et al., 2005; Papafragou & Musolino,
2003). For example, the utterance “Some of the boys went to the party”, the word
some implicates “not all of the boys went to the party.” Hence, according to Grice’s
maxims of Quantity to say no more or no less than is required for effective
communication, if the speaker meant that the stronger term “all” applied, then he or
she should have used it rather than the weaker one “some”. As a test of this
understanding using scalar implicatures common to both English and Japanese,
children aged 4–6 years who were either English monolingual or English-Japanese
bilinguals heard a puppet talked about actions such as that of a teddy bear who put all
the hoops available on a pole as having put ‘‘Some of the hoops on the pole.” They
were asked whether the puppet could have described the action better. Although
having lower vocabulary (receptive) scores, the bilingual children significantly
outperformed their monolingual counterparts in showing sensitivity to the use of scalar
implicatures by identifying pragmatically inappropriate uses of the term some.
The second study aimed to address the question of whether bilingualism
confers an advantage in terms of children’s conversational understanding in a more
general sense. Siegal, Iozzi, and Surian (2009) gave Italian monolingual and
Slovenian monolingual children and Slovenian-Italian bilingual children a
42
Conversational Violations Test (CVT), which involves the detection of utterances that
violate a maxim for conversation in the Gricean framework (Siegal, 2008; Surian,
Baron-Cohen, & van der Lely, 1996; Surian & Siegal, 2001). Children were shown a
movie clip in which short conversational exchanges were presented by three dolls, one
male and two female. For each episode, one of the two female dolls asked a question
to the other two dolls, which each gave an answer. One of the answers violated a
conversational maxim and the other did not. The utterances violated the first or the
second maxim of Quantity, the maxim of Quality, the maxim of Relation and the
maxim of Politeness. For example, one question on the Second Maxim of Quantity
(redundant information) was: “Who is your best friend?” and the two answers were:
“My best friend is Pietro. He wears clothes.” versus “My best friend is Pietro. He goes
to school with me.” The children were asked to ‘‘point to the doll that said something
silly or rude.” (p. 116). The authors found that despite a significantly lower
vocabulary, bilingual children were better in detecting violations of conversational
maxims than the monolingual children across all but one of the five components of the
CVT. The authors believed, though, there were unforeseen cultural and contextual
factors that might have affected the children’s responses to this specific component.
Also, there were no significant differences between the monolinguals and bilinguals
on tasks that measure executive functioning, so better executive control abilities often
found in bilingual children were not considered as the key factor in performing the
CVT, although a wider range of measures corresponding to various aspects of
executive functioning (Miyake et al., 2000) might display differences better. One
other possible explanation is that the vocabulary delay in early bilingualism might be
43
accompanied by a compensatory mechanism such that bilingual children may come to
be more attentive than monolinguals to the specific pragmatics of communication and
to use this ability to infer speakers’ messages. There was no comparison of
bilinguals’ CVT performance in both their languages and was also no direct measure
of socioeconomic status of the participants.
To address the above issues, Siegal and colleagues (2010) gave the same
Conversational Violations Test (CVT) to 3- to 6-year-old children exposed to English,
German, Italian, and Japanese. In addition, the authors explored possible cultural
differences between language groups by questioning mothers on their Japanese
identity and also food preferences. Results showed that for the German-Italian group,
bilingual children outperformed their Italian monolingual counterparts in the CVT. In
both younger (37 to 55 months) and older (56 to 75 months) age groups, the bilingual
advantage was significant on three out of the four maxim components. In the younger
children, there was no significant bilingual difference only on Quantity and in the
older children, only on Politeness. For the English-Japanese group, bilingual children
scored significantly higher than Japanese monolinguals. A strong Japanese cultural
affinity shown by both groups of mothers appeared to rule out family cultural
background as an explanation for the CVT advantage shown by English-Japanese
bilinguals. The results provided support to the proposition that exposure to more than
one language confers an advantage in children’s conversational understanding,
underscoring their ability to appreciate effective communicative responses. It is
plausible, too, that because of the constant motivation to figure out the appropriate
language choice to use in order to avoid communication breakdown, bilingual children
44
gain a wider range of pragmatic knowledge to draw out the conversational
implications of a speaker’s message, and thus are able to avoid using inappropriate
alternatives in a communicative context (Blum-Kulka, 1997).
Bilingual Children’s Heightened Sensitivity to Verbal Feedback and Prompts
The bilingual children’s constant efforts to maintain communicative
effectiveness may also heighten their sensitivity to feedback cues. Bilingual children
have been shown to be better than monolingual children at picking up verbal feedback
and prompts from their communicative partner (Ben-Zeev, 1977; Cummins &
Mulcahy, 1978; Hakuta, 1987; Diesendruck, 2004).
Ben-Zeev (1977) found that bilingual children (age 5 to 9) were more sensitive
to feedback cues. She presented a classification and reclassification test to both
monolingual and bilingual children. Whenever a child perseverated by giving the
same classification twice instead of switching to another, the experimenter provided
hints in the next trial that indicated the need to reclassify. For example, if a child was
stuck on classifying into two shape categories, say, round and square, the hint set
would also include triangles, which made it difficult to classify by shape again into
two groups. She found that bilingual children picked up these hints more quickly, and,
once given feedback, corrected their mistakes faster than their monolingual
counterparts did.
In a similar vein, Cummins and Mulcahy (1978) found that bilinguals were
better able than monolinguals to use prompts to help them recognize ambiguity in
sentences. In their study, first and third grade children were shown four line drawings
45
while the experimenter read an ambiguous sentence. They had to choose the two
correct pictures representing the two interpretations of the sentence and provide an
adequate explanation of their choices. If they chose only one of two correct answers a
verbal prompt was given to see if the other correct answer could be elicited. Bilinguals
made better use of the prompts than monolinguals, and subsequently found the second
answer more often than monolinguals.
Nonverbal Communicative Cues in Understanding a Speaker’s Referential
Intents
A substantial amount of work examining the impact of bilingualism has been
done in the field of executive control (as described in earlier section) and a modest
amount of research has attempted to investigate the impact of bilingualism on the
communicative competence in children in terms of managing communicative
breakdown, conversational understanding and verbal feedback and prompts.
However, little is known about the impact of bilingualism in the use of nonverbal
communicative cues in understanding a speaker’s referential intents. We
communicate with much more than words. Understanding of social cues is critical to
interpreting people’s desires, intentions, and beliefs and plays a huge role in language
learning (Baldwin, 2000; Tomasello, 1999). In the next section of the paper, I will
review recent research that provide evidence that growing up in a linguistically varied
environment may impact on children’s sensitivity to the use of nonverbal
communicative cues, such as pointing, eye gaze and intonation, to determine a
speaker’s communicative intents.
46
Nonverbal referential gestures. Growing up bilingual might make children
more tuned-in to nonverbal signals and referential gestures such as eye gaze and
pointing, especially in complex, potentially confusing situations. Growing up in a
linguistically variable environment places constant demands on bilingual children to
figure out the appropriate language choice to use and they rely in part on monitoring
cues as to their partner’s referential intent to accomplish this. This hypothesis is built,
in part, on previous results that found bilingual children’s better use of nonverbal
gestures (e.g. pointing) in understanding a speaker’s referential intent than
monolingual children, especially when the gesture was pitted against other
assumptions that children made (Yow & Markman, 2007). A well-documented
assumption in word learning is children’s propensity to resist second labels for objects.
When children are shown, say a spoon and a whisk, and asked, “Can you hand me the
gadget?” they overwhelmingly pick the whisk. There are several competing
explanations for this in the literature, but the finding itself is beyond dispute (P.
Bloom, 2000; Clark, 1988, 1990, 1997; Diesendruck & Markson, 2001; Gathercole,
1987, 1989; Markman & Wachtel, 1988; Merriman & Bowman, 1989). To distinguish
between some of these competing explanations, Jaswal and Hansen (2006) examined
whether children would readily accept a second label for the familiar object if the
speaker actually (somewhat subtly) pointed to the familiar object while asking for it.
In a control condition where no novel label was used, they found that when the
speaker pointed to or looked at the familiar object and asked, “Can you give it to me?”
children overwhelmingly selected the familiar object pointed to, thus demonstrating
that the children readily picked up the subtle point or gaze as an intention to refer to
47
the familiar object. However, when the speaker pointed to or looked at the familiar
object and requested it using a novel label, for example, “Can you give me the
blicket?” most children chose the novel object instead even though the speaker was
pointing to or looking at the other object. Thus children relied less on these referential
cues when they conflicted with their propensity to reject second labels for objects.
This pattern was even stronger when the referential gesture provided was the subtler
one (i.e. gaze vs. pointing).
Yow and Markman (2007) examined whether bilingual children may be better
able to use pointing in a context such as Jaswal and Hansen’s where the referential
cues are subtle and pitted against other assumptions children make. They found that
when young children were simply asked to “give it to me” when no label was used,
both monolingual and bilingual children overwhelmingly relied on the speaker’s point
and picked the familiar object that was pointed to, replicating Jaswal and Hansen’s
(2006) results. However, when the speaker pointed to the familiar object and
requested it using a novel label, the monolingual children were less likely to select the
familiar object even when the experimenter pointed to it, also replicating Jaswal and
Hansen’s results. In marked contrast, bilingual children relied more on the speaker’s
referential gesture in deciding how to interpret the novel label than on prior one-
object-one-label expectations when these cues were in conflict with each other. An
open question from that study, though, is whether this might be in part because
bilingual children have a weaker bias against second labels.
A second series of studies provided converging evidence that the experience of
bilingualism heightens children’s sensitivity to a speaker’s communicative intent in a
48
context where a rejection of second labels does not come into play at all (Yow &
Markman, 2009a). The studies were adapted from Povinelli, Reaux, Bierschwale,
Allain, and Simon (1997) procedures where they found 2.5-year-old children having
difficulty in using referential gestures such as eye gaze to help them locate the object-
of-interest when such gestures were provided with some conflicting information. In
the standard condition of the Povinelli et al. (1997) study, the experimenter pointed to
or looked at one of two boxes while the two boxes were positioned equal distance
from him. In the body-biased condition, the experimenter sat behind one box (the
incorrect, empty box) but gestured toward the box that was farthest from him (the
correct, baited box). Povinelli et al. found that even under this more demanding body-
biased condition, children successfully located hidden rewards based on the
experimenter’s pointing. However, they had difficulty in locating the hidden rewards
when the referential gesture was eye gaze. When we adapted the above procedure
with 2- to 5-year-old monolingual and bilingual children, we found some interesting
developmental results: 1) 3- and 4-year-old bilingual children were better able than
their monolingual peers to use referential gestures to locate a hidden toy only in the
most challenging body-biased gaze condition, 2) monolingual 3- and 4-year old
children significantly chose the correct box above chance in all conditions except the
body-biased gaze condition while bilingual children were significantly better than
chance in choosing the correct box across all conditions, 3) the bilingual advantage
can be found in children as young as 2 years old across all conditions, and 4)
monolingual children had mastered this task by 5 years of age. Hence, young
bilinguals are indeed more sensitive to nonverbal referential gestures such as pointing
49
and eye gaze especially when contrasted with some conflicting information. Our
studies suggest that bilingualism facilitates the development of the understanding and
use of referential gestures.
Nonverbal paralinguistic cues. Another type of important nonverbal cues
that we often use in interpreting social meanings is paralinguistic cues (e.g. pitch,
tempo, etc.) A speaker’s feelings can be discerned both from lexical content (e.g. “I
won a trip to New York”) and paralinguistic cues. One can use the lexical content of
an utterance to depict the emotional implications directly, or express it by altering his
or her speaking rate, pitch level, pitch contours, and voice quality (Frick, 1985). For
example, happiness is usually marked by speech with high pitch, rapid tempo, large
pitch range, and bright voice quality, while sadness is marked by speech with low
pitch, slow tempo, narrow pitch range and soft voice (Scherer, 1986). Typically,
paralinguistic cues are in concordance with the emotive verbal content, such as a
happy event is described in a delightful manner. However, at times, the lexical
content and paralinguistic cues convey contradictory messages about the speaker’s
emotion, such as when a happy sentence is said in a sad voice. Past research indicated
that adults consider all available cues (Morton & Trehub, 2001; Reilly & Muzekari,
1979), but that they rely primarily on paralinguistic cues when lexical content and
paralinguistic cues conflict with each other (Argyle, Alkema, & Gilmour, 1971;
Mehrabian & Wiener, 1967; Morton & Trehub, 2001). In contrast, preschoolers
respond differently when these cues are in conflict (Friend, 2000; Friend & Bryant,
2000; Lacks, 1997; Morton & Munakata, 2002; Morton & Trehub, 2001; Solomon &
Ali, 1972). More specifically, 4-to-5-year-old children give more weight to content
50
than paralanguage when judging the speaker’s emotion, especially when the lexical
content of an utterance conflicts with the paralanguage used to express it. In Friend’s
(2000) study, 4-to-10-year-old children heard pre-recorded voice and were asked to
tell the experimenter whether the voice sounded “happy” or “mad” by pointing to one
of two schematic faces representing these emotions. The children heard “happy”
sentences such as “Oh good you got them all” and “mad” sentences such as “You’ll
never behave yourself” recorded in both happy voice and angry voice. The stimuli
were consistent if the “happy” sentences were said in a happy voice or if the “mad”
sentences were said in an angry voice. The messages were discrepant if the “happy”
sentences were said in an angry voice or if the “mad” sentences were said in a happy
voice. Three neutral utterances were presented at the beginning and the end to provide
the children with a baseline of the speaker’s voice. The children were encouraged to
use paralinguistic rather than lexical cues as the basis for their judgments. Friend
found that 4-year-olds were unable to selectively attend to paralanguage when
discrepant lexical cues were present in the recorded speech. There was a trend toward
greater attention to paralanguage when lexical and paralinguistic cues were
inconsistent in the recorded speech such that by 10 years of age, children were able to
use prosodic cues to determine the speaker’s affect even in the case of a
lexical/paralinguistic discrepancy. Similarly, Morton & Trehub (2001) asked children
and adults to judge whether a speaker was happy or sad. Participants heard forty
sentences describing happy and sad situations recorded in either a happy or sad voice.
Half of the sentences had content and paralanguage matched and half had these cues
conflicted. When the cues matched, both children and adults could accurately identify
51
happy and sad sentences. When the cues conflicted (e.g. happy situation said in sad
voice), 4-year-olds almost exclusively judged a speaker’s emotion from what she said
rather than how she sounded, in contrast to adults who overwhelming relied on how
she sounded. They concluded that young children have limited understanding of the
communicative functions of affective paralanguage.
Bilingual children with a greater need to attend to speaker’s communicative
requirements may be more willing to rely on paralinguistic cues to interpret emotion.
In our prior work with 4-year-old monolingual and bilingual children, we adapted
Morton and Trehub (2001) study using the same speech stimuli where happy and sad
situations were recorded in either happy or sad voices (half had content and
paralanguage matched and half had them conflicted) (Yow & Markman, 2009b).
Children were asked to listen carefully to the sentences presented from a computer and
decide if the speaker was feeling happy or sad by pressing pre-designated buttons that
correspond to a happy or sad face on the computer keyboard. They had four practice
trials with neutral sentences, half recorded in happy voice and half in sad voice. The
forty sentences were then presented in four blocks of ten. There were prompts in
between blocks to indicate that they had to press the “happy” button if she sounds
happy and press the “sad” button if she sounds sad. The results revealed that when
content and paralanguage matched, all children could identify happy and sad sentences
equally well. But when content conflicted with paralanguage, monolinguals relied on
content significantly more than paralanguage when judging the speaker’s emotion. In
contrast, bilingual children were more willing to use paralanguage to interpret a
speaker’s emotion even when content conflicted with paralanguage. The results
52
provided evidence that young bilingual children are better able than their monolingual
peers to tune-in to the speaker’s affective intent and utilize paralinguistic cues when
judging emotion.
We conducted a follow-up study using the same utterances preserving the
affective information but eliminating the semantic content to examine whether
monolingual and bilingual children could equally label the paralanguage in the
utterances. The same speech stimuli were low-pass filtered, eliminating most phonetic
cues and rendering the content unintelligible but preserving the affective information
transmitted by fundamental frequency and speaking rate (Rogers, Scherer, &
Rosenthal, 1971; Scherer, Koivumaki, & Rosenthal, 1972). Four-year-old
monolingual and bilingual children were asked to label the filtered speech as happy or
sad by pressing pre-designated buttons that correspond to a happy or sad face on a
computer keyboard. Results found no difference between monolingual and bilingual
preschoolers’ ability to use paralanguage to interpret a speaker’s emotion. In sum,
while both monolingual and bilingual children are equally capable of identifying
paralanguage in utterances, bilingual children are better able than their monolingual
peers to tune-in to the speaker’s affective intent and pay more attention to
paralinguistic cues when judging emotion, especially when the content of the utterance
is in conflict with the paralanguage that comes with it.
The literature reviewed thus far suggests that bilinguals represent their two
languages separately and that these two languages are active in parallel even when
only one language is currently in use. Bilinguals also frequently switch between
languages and their language choice depends on various linguistic and sociopragmatic
53
factors, such as lexical access, language used in the domain, person they are speaking
with, topic of conversation, intention of the speaker/listener, etc. The literature
reviewed also suggests that the constant need to inhibit the unwanted language at any
given time by a bilingual accords beneficial effects on executive functioning over and
beyond normal maturity of cognitive abilities. This advantage of bilinguals was found
in children, adults as well as the elderly. Such cognitive benefits also extend to
children’s ability to represent others’ mental states. Studies also found that bilingual
children can pragmatically differentiate their use of each language, matching language
choice and code-switching patterns with according to context and communicative
needs of the interlocutors. There is also evidence that bilingual children have a higher
level of pragmatic competence than monolingual children as shown in their enhanced
ability to detect violations of conversational maxims. Studies also suggest that
bilingual children may have a heightened sensitivity to verbal feedback, prompts, and
nonverbal communicative cues (such as referential gestures and paralinguistic cues).
In summary, the literature suggests that the experience of growing up bilingual, the
challenges of maintaining one effective language at any one time and of figuring out
the communicative requirements of a dynamic multi-lingual context, may facilitate
young bilingual children’s sensitivity to socio-communicative cues to understand
people’s attention, intent, desires and communicative needs.
However, little is known about the impact of bilingualism on the development
of a more sophisticated aspect of communicative competence, where children need to
integrate multiple cues to interpret multiple cues to understand a speaker’s intent, and
the process in which the development of such communicative competence is
54
enhanced. In the next section of this paper, I will lay out the background of several
areas in which I will frame my research question.
Integrating Multiple Cues and Maintaining Communicative Effectiveness
In the most simplistic form of communication, a speaker means exactly what
he says – every single word is a simple representation of his intent, knowledge state,
belief, or emotion. However, in most natural situations, words are just one among
many cues to the speaker’s communicative intent (Bloom, 1997; Clark, 1996; Sperber
& Wilson, 1986). An utterance can often be interpreted in multiple, potentially
conflicting ways. For example, when someone said, “It is really cold in here”, the
utterance could be taken to mean literally that the temperature in the room is low, or
implied to mean that the person is not feeling well, or even ironically to emphasize a
hot and sweltering room. Hence, successful communication requires speakers and
listeners to attend to and integrate a wide range of information including the literal
meaning of an utterance, information obtained from the linguistic and nonlinguistic
context, nonlinguistic gestures such as eye gaze and pointing, the intonation is which a
sentence is uttered and the pragmatics of the situation (e.g. Ackerman, 1986; Archer &
Akert, 1977; Clark & Gerrig, 1984; Cutler, 1974; De Groot et al., 1995; Kreuz, 1996;
for a review, see Pexman, 2005). While such sophisticated communication skills are
often found in matured communicators, such as adults, the development literature
suggests that young children typically have difficulty in attending to multiple cues to
figure out a speaker’s intent, especially when they need to be integrated with other
cues that are present in the same communicative situation.
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Integrating Eye Gaze, Semantics, and Context
Interpreting a speaker’s communicative intent can be challenging when
multiple cues have to be interpreted differently in light of other cues that co-occur
together, such as gestures, semantics and context. For example, whether a speaker is
referring to an object that she is looking at (eye gaze) depends in part on how she asks
for the object (semantics) and what is visible to her (context). In Nurmsoo and Bloom
(2008)’s Experiment 1, two novel objects were placed in a box positioned between a
speaker and a child. A screen blocked part of the speaker’s view, such that she could
only see one but not the other. In contrast, the two objects were in full view of the
child. The speaker then fixed her gaze upon the visible object and said either “There’s
the [novel-word]!” or “Where’s the [novel-word]?” The challenge of this task is that
children have to integrate multiple cues to understand which object the speaker is
referring to. The speaker’s eye gaze provides information about which object she is
looking at. The context is that she knows there are two objects, but she can see only
one but not the other. Finally, the semantics of the utterance “there” conveys
information about reference to a specific target object. So in the “there” trials,
integrating all these cues means we should expect that the speaker is referring to the
mutually visible object when she looked at it and said “there”. In the “where” trials,
the speaker provides the same eye gaze cue, the same context, but now the semantics
of the utterance is changed such that the speaker is asking “where” an object is. In this
case, then integrating all these cues means we should expect that the speaker is
actually looking for the other one that she could not see when he said “where”.
Nurmsoo and Bloom found that 4-year-olds successfully adjusted their use of
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experimenter’s eye gaze to retrieve the correct object under these two linguistic
contexts: retrieving the object that the experimenter looked at when she said “there”
and retrieving the other object that the experimenter could not see when she said
“where”. However, 2.5-year-olds were less successful in differentially using the
experimenter’s eye gaze: they were more likely to pick the visible object when the
speaker said “there” but were not more likely to pick the nonvisible object when the
speaker said “where”.
Hancock, Dunham, & Purdy (2000) suggested that as children become more
sophisticated in attending to multiple aspects of communication simultaneously, they
adjust their responses based on singular message components (e.g. words, face, voice)
to integrating the different information and responding as communicative wholes.
Such communicative skills may be developed earlier in children who regularly
experience communicative situation that demand greater attention, flexibility, and
understanding of referential intent. Monolingual and bilingual children alike must
learn to monitor and integrate multiple aspects of a communication to communicate
successfully and avoid breakdowns in communication (e.g. Baldwin, 1995; Hollich,
Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2000; Tomasello, 2003). But bilingual children
additionally have to monitor and evaluate whether they and their communicative
partners are speaking the same language. Bilingual children thus face a greater risk of
communicative failure when, for example, an adult speaker switches to a language a
bilingual child does not understand, or when a bilingual child responds in a language
that an adult speaker does not speak. The increased risk of communicative failure
places a greater demand on bilingual over monolingual children both in terms of
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cognitive load and understanding of referential intent. As such, bilingual children’s
constant efforts to maintain communicative effectiveness may foster their ability to
integrate multiple communicative cues in various contexts. Hence, the first study of
my dissertation research will seek to explore how monolingual and bilingual children
integrate multiple cues such as eye gaze, semantics (“where” vs. “there” sentences),
and context (what is visible to the experimenter) to understand a speaker’s referential
intent, using Nurmsoo and Bloom (2008)’s paradigm where children have to modulate
various cues to find a target referent as described earlier. Monolingual children, on the
other hand, may need additional information to help them understand a speaker’s
referential intent. The second part of my dissertation research will explore whether
monolingual children benefited from additional communicative cues that would guide
them in integrating multiple cues to understand the speaker’s referential intent and
help bring the monolingual children up to the performance of their bilingual peers.
Integrating Eye Gaze, Semantics, Context, and Tone of Voice
Cues such as eye gaze, semantics, and context can also be interpreted
differently along with paralinguistic cues such as intonation. For example, an
utterance can either reflect a genuine question or statement, which signals an authentic
search behavior, or a playful “I-know-where-is-it-but-let’s-see-if-you-can-find-it”
intention. Paralinguistic cues provide an important source of information to help
children decide if the speaker is playing pretend with them. In some instances a
distinctive intonation may aid children’s ability to detect the speaker’s underlying
meaning (De Groot et al., 1995). Reissland and Snow (1996) found that parents vary
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the pitch and pitch range of their speech in pretend and instructional situations with
children as young as 11-month-olds. Monolingual mothers were audio- and
videotaped in their homes while having a meal with a spoon (real situation) and while
feeding a doll with a spoon (play situation). They found that mothers spoke at a
higher pitch and broader pitch range when pretending, both when the mothers tried to
introduce the play situation and also when the infants had become active participants
in the play activities. They concluded that mothers used pitch height and pitch range
to help their infants to distinguish between play and non-play situations and continued
to use these paralinguistic cues to sustain the pretend-play engagement. Smiles may
also provide some cues to pretend behaviors. Piaget (1945/1962) claimed that “the
smile of the child is enough to show that it is perfectly conscious of pretending” (pp.
32). People rely on smiles, as well as laughter, to determine when a fight is real
versus play (Fry, 1987; Smith, 1997). More recently, Lillard and Witherington (2004)
analyzed mothers’ behaviors while they pretended to have a snack and really had a
snack and found that mothers tend to smile more when pretending, and these smiles
lasted longer on average than those in the real condition. Children might have inferred
from the smiles that the mother’s behaviors were fun and silly and not meant to be
taken seriously.
No studies to date have been conducted to examine whether children can make
use of tone of voice in conjunction with other communicative cues to determine the
speaker’s referential intent. For example, when a speaker looks at one visible novel
object and asks a searching question in a serious tone (e.g. lower pitch, frowning
eyebrows), he is indicating that the object he is looking at is not what he wants. In
59
contrast, if he looks at the visible novel object and asks a searching question in a
playful manner (e.g. higher pitch, smiles), he is indicating that the object he is looking
at is indeed the one that he is searching for. Hence, part three of my dissertation
research will use a modified version of the Nurmsoo and Bloom (2008) paradigm to
investigate whether bilingual children can integrate multiple cues that involve tone of
voice, eye gaze, semantics, and context more effectively than monolinguals to
understand the speaker’s referential intent.
Integrating Gestures with Speech Internal Cues in Pronoun Interpretation
In addition to the challenge of integrating communicative cues, such as eye
gaze, semantics, context, and tone of voice, words that are context sensitive also pose
a challenge to understanding the speaker’s referential intent. Pronouns like he and
she, common in everyday speech, do not consistently map onto any referent, instead,
their meaning is determined anew each time they are used. However, most of the
time, adult listeners do not notice the ambiguity, and are quickly and easily able to
infer the speaker’s intended meaning using a variety of cues present in the speech
signal such as gender (Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2000),
emphatic stress (Maratsos, 1973), and order-of-mention (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt,
Trueswell, & Fagnano, 2004). Order-of-mention refers to a tendency of adults to
interpret the first-mentioned entity, amongst others, as the referent for the ambiguous
pronoun (first-mentioned bias). This is because first-mentioned entities tend to
correlate with the likelihood that they will be referred to again in the immediate
discourse (Arnold, 1998, 2001; Arnold, & Tanenhaus, in press) and being the
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grammatical subject, first-mentioned entities also tend to be the most accessible when
interpreting pronouns (Arnold, Wasow, Losongco, & Ginstrom, 2000; Gordon, Grosz,
& Gilliom, 1993).
However, pronouns are particularly challenging for young children to interpret
because they carry relatively little lexical information, usually only about the animacy,
gender, and quantity of a referent (Arnold et al., 2007) and the use of pronouns in
discourse depends, in part, on the shared knowledge and expectations of the
interlocutors. So while adults have shown to be able to use gender and order-of-
mention information to resolve the interpretation of pronouns successfully (Arnold,
1998; Garnham, 2001; Gundel, Hedberg, & Zacharski, 1993; Stevenson, Crawley, &
Kleinman, 1994), children, on the other hand, showed successful pronoun resolution
based on gender but not order-of-mention information (e.g. Brener, 1983; Song &
Fisher, 2005; Arnold, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2007). For example, Arnold and
colleagues (2007), examined whether adults and 4- and 5-year-old children were able
to resolve pronouns on the basis of gender information and order-of-mention.
Participants listened to a puppet (Elmo) telling simple short stories about two
characters, e.g. “Bunny is playing outside with Froggy. She wants a ball.” (p.11). The
characters were visually represented by dolls on a table and the dolls had stereotypical
either male or female appearances (in the case of adults, the characters were presented
as pictures on a computer screen). The experimenter then presented the participant
with an object (e.g. a toy ball), and asked “Can you show me who wants the ball in
Elmo’s story?” The child responded by picking up the toy and placing it in front of
one of the two character dolls while the adult answered the question by clicking on
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one of the two characters on the computer. Results showed that adults showed a
preference for the first-mentioned character in the same-gender condition and
generally chose the gender-matched pronoun in the different-gender condition, though
they still chose the first-mentioned character 23% of the time in the different-
gender/second-mention condition, showing a general first-mention bias. Children, in
contrast, while were adult-like in using gender to interpret the pronoun, showed no
tendency to prefer the first-mentioned character in the same-gender condition. Their
results suggested that by 4 years of age, children were able to use gender to guide their
interpretation of pronouns. But when two characters had the same gender, children
showed no order-of-mention bias like adults, that is, they were equally likely to choose
the first-mentioned or second-mentioned character as the referent for the pronoun.
Gestures, however, may be helpful in providing additional information that
disambiguates the interpretation of pronouns in speech. Children can detect and
process information conveyed by gesture (e.g. Church, Kelly, & Lynch, 2000; Kelly
& Church, 1997, 1998). When gestural information is provided that disambiguates
conceptual reference in speech, gesture is detected and used for interpretation (Barr,
Kelly, Church, & Lynch, 1999; Thompson & Massaro, 1994). For example, if the
spoken word for ‘ball’ was obscured (consonants are slurred so it was not clear
whether the word ‘ball’ or ‘doll’ was being said), a point to the object, ball, greatly
improved the identification of the word ‘ball’ (Thompson & Massaro, 1994). In this
context, gesture can be relied upon in communication, in addition to other information.
Indeed, Goodrich and Hudson Kam (2007) showed that co-referential localizing
gestures affected adults’ interpretation of pronouns, such that they were less likely to
62
interpret an ambiguous pronoun as referring to the first-mentioned character if the
gesture was referring to the second-mentioned character. Co-referential localizing
gestures refer to gestures by speakers in a location in space when referring to an entity
and then gesture back to the same location when referring to that entity again later in
the same discourse (Kendon, 2004; McNeill, 1992; So, Coppola, Licciardello, &
Goldin-Meadow, 2005). However, no studies to date have examined the use of
gestures to help disambiguate the right referent involving the use of pronouns in
children. In part four of my dissertation research, I will use a modified version of the
Arnold et al. (2007) procedures paired with co-referential localizing gestures to
examine whether monolingual and bilingual children show an order-of-mention bias
(or lack of), and most importantly, to what extent monolingual and bilingual children
use gestures to help them identify the right referent of the pronoun.
Experience of Communication Breakdown as a Contributing Factor
One critical research question remains, however, is exactly how and what in
the bilingual process facilitates bilingual children’s precocious ability to effectively
use various communicative cues to determine a speaker’s referential intent. Growing
up in an environment where children regularly hear people speaking more than one
language may result in a greater chance of a communication breakdown. Such
communication failure may occur when a wrong language was used, either as a base
language, in mixing with another language, or failure to switch back or translate, etc.
(e.g. Grosjean, 1989). This risk of communicative failure may intensify the need of
bilingual children to avoid such communication breakdown by using cues provided by
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the speaker to ascertain the appropriate demands of the communication situation. I
propose that it is this greater need to avoid communication breakdown in the bilingual
environment that motivates children to mobilize greater effort to maintain effective
communication and in turn results in their heightened sensitivity to communicative
cues that determine a speaker’s referential intent.
To test this hypothesis, the final part of my dissertation research will explore
how the experience of a communication breakdown of a bilingual nature may increase
children’s sensitivity to communicative cues. In a bilingual environment,
codeswitching from one language to another, or language mixing, is a common
experience. Codeswitching often occurs when a word or a phrase in one language is
replaced for a word or phrase in the other language (Li, 1996). For example, in this
sentence by an English-Spanish speaker: “Dame una hamburguesa sin LETTUCE por
favor” (“Give me a hamburger without LETTUCE please”) (Heredia & Altarriba,
2001, p. 164), the Spanish word “lechuga” was replaced by the English word
“lettuce”. Hence, in the above example, a communicative failure will occur if a
Spanish listener does not understand the English word “lettuce”. In part five of my
dissertation research, I will explore whether injecting a communication breakdown of
a bilingual nature, such as the codeswitching example mentioned above, will increase
children’s sensitivity to the use of communicative cues.
In summary, while previous research suggested that bilingual children were
better able to use either a speaker’s verbal or nonverbal cues to understand the
demands of a communicative situation, my dissertation research explores how the
experience of growing up bilingual may foster children’s ability to modulate and
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integrate the use of multiple communicative cues (both verbal and nonverbal) in
various contexts. This research also provides unique insights to the communicative
process of growing up bilingual, that is, the investigation of the role of communication
breakdown, similar to that commonly experienced by bilinguals, in the development of
communicative competence in children. Importantly, this research contributes to the
understanding of cognitive development in general. It considers childhood
bilingualism as a natural experiment to examine the role of experience in developing
communicative skills needed to interpret a speaker’s communicative intent. More
specifically, Study 1 seeks to examine how monolingual and bilingual children
integrate various cues, such as eye gaze, semantics, and context of perceptual access to
figure out a speaker’s referential intent. Study 2 explores whether monolingual
children benefit from additional nonverbal information that would guide them in
integrating multiple cues to understand the speaker’s referential intent and help bring
their performance up to the level of their bilingual peers. Study 3 investigates the
extent to which monolingual and bilingual children are able to integrate additional
cues when an added complexity is introduced to the task, such as tone of voice. Study
4 extends the research to examine children’s integration of gestural cues in
interpreting ambiguous, context-sensitive words (e.g. pronouns). Finally, Study 5
seeks to examine the role of communication breakdown of a bilingual nature in
contributing to children’s effective use of communicative cues.
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CHAPTER 2
PRESENT RESEARCH
Study 1:
Integrating Eye Gaze, Context, and Semantics
The first study investigated whether there are differences between monolingual
and bilingual children in their use of various communicative cues to figure out a
speaker’s referential intent. Specifically, Study 1 requires children to integrate a
speaker’s eye gaze, context of the speaker’s perceptual access, and semantics of an
utterance in order to respond correctly to the speaker’s request. The study replicated
Nurmsoo and Bloom (2008)’s procedure with 3-year-old monolingual and bilingual
children where children saw two novel objects while the experimenter could see only
one (context). The experimenter looked at the object she could see (eye gaze) and said
either “There’s the [novel-word!]” or Where’s the [novel-word]?” (semantics).
Method
Participants. Thirty-two 3-year-old English monolingual and bilingual
children from Bing Nursery School participated in this study. Sixteen children were
monolinguals (8 males, mean age = 3.77, range = 3.39-3.96). The remaining 16 were
bilinguals (8 males, mean age = 3.68, range = 3.46-3.98).
A language questionnaire was sent to the parents via the school that asked for
information about the language first acquired by the child, the language used by the
parents and caregivers, and the amount of time (average percentage of exposure per
66
week) the child was exposed to each language. Children were determined to be
bilingual if they had at least 30% exposure to one of two languages weekly. The 16
bilingual children in the study were reported to have regular exposure to another
language besides English, such as Spanish (n=7), Mandarin (n=2), Korean (n=2),
French (n=2), German, Italian, and Russian (n=1 per language) mainly either from
parents or a nanny.
Materials and procedure. Children were tested individually in a quiet room
in their preschool. We also administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Digit-
Span task, and Day-Night Stroop task subsequently to check whether the monolingual
and bilingual children differ in their receptive vocabulary level, short-term memory,
and inhibitory control skills.
Experimental design. The materials consisted of an opaque cardboard box (32
cm x 22 cm) and a bag of toys. The box had two compartments with a window each.
A movable screen covered one of the windows. The box was placed between the child
and the experimenter such that the child could see into both compartments but the
experimenter could only see into one through the uncovered window. There were two
familiar toys (a teddy bear and a toy car) and eight novel objects (uncommon objects
or parts of a bigger object). The four pairs of novel objects were used with four novel
labels, spoodle, nurmy, flurg, and gorp as per Nurmsoo and Bloom (2008). The target
object, its location relative to the window and the left/right position of the screen were
all counterbalanced. In the familiarization phase, the two familiar toys were placed in
each of the compartments of the box. From the child’s perspective, both toys were
visible, but from the experimenter’s perspective, only the toy in the compartment with
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the window was visible. The child was first asked to identify which toy he thinks the
experimenter could and could not see. The box was then rotated so that the child now
had the experimenter’s perspective. The child was then asked to identify which toy he
now could and could not see. In the experimental phase, there were two “there” trials
and two “where” trials, identical except for the test question. On each of the four
trials, the child explored a pair of novel objects with two adults (the experimenter and
the assistant). The experimenter turned her back while the assistant placed the objects
in the box, one in each compartment (see Figure 1). When the experimenter turned
around, she fixed her gaze on the object that she could see and asked the test question.
On “there” trials, the experimenter said, “Oh! There’s the [novel label]! There it is!”
On “where” trials, she said, “Oh! Where’s the [novel label]? Where is it?” In both
conditions, the experimenter then looked up at the child, held out her hand, and asked,
“Can I have the [novel label]?”
Figure 1. Screenshots from Study 1.
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Socio-economic status, receptive vocabulary, short-term memory, and
inhibitory control skills.
Socio-economic status (SES). To verify that the monolingual and bilingual
children were drawn from the same socioeconomic status (SES) population, we
followed the procedure reported by Buck, Small, Schisterman, Lyon & Rogers (2000),
Furth et al. (2000), Rathore et al. (2006), Ward (2008) and Westenberg, Siebelink,
Warmenhoven & Treffers (1999) and used the participants’ residential addresses to
obtain an estimated value of each family’s dwelling from an internet website that
provides real estate information such as home prices and home values
(www.zillow.com). Using this method, we then calculated the median, mean, and
variance property valuation for the monolingual and bilingual children in order to
determine whether the two groups of children differ in SES.
Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test IV (Dunn & Dunn, 2007). This is a test of
receptive vocabulary where each child was to select one picture from a set of four that
depicts the word that was being spoken by the experimenter. The test continued until
the child made eight or more errors in any set of 12 items. Raw scores were converted
to standard scores using normalized tables based on age.
Digit-Span task (adapted from Wechsler, 1974). This task was adapted from
the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised as a test of short-term memory.
A list of pre-determined random numbers ranging from two to nine digits was read out
loud. Each child was to repeat all the numbers verbally in the same order. There were
two trials for each digit length. The test began with two numbers, increasing until the
child committed errors on both trials of the same digit length. The child’s digit span
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score was the total number of trials completed correctly.
Day-Night task (adapted from Gerstadt, Hong, & Diamond, 1994). This task
was adapted from the day-night task used in Gerstadt et al. (1994). It involves
instructing children to say the word “day” when they see a card depicting a nighttime
sky and to say “night” when shown a picture of the daytime sky. This task requires
remembering the two rules and inhibiting a response to the visual cues. There were
two training cards and 16 testing cards used in this study. Half of the cards showed a
yellow sun in a light blue background and half showed a white crescent moon and
stars on a black background. The instructions and presentation of cards were adapted
from Siegal, Iozzi, and Surian (2009). The experimenter first showed each child a
card with the moon and said, “We are going to play a funny game. When you see this
card I want you to say day. Can you say day?” The experimenter continued to show a
card with the sun and said, “Now, when you see this card I want you to say night. Can
you say night?” The child was then shown the first test card with the sun and asked,
“Now, what do you say when you see this card?” The child was shown a card with the
moon next and asked, “What do you say when you see this card?” If the child got
either of the first two test trials wrong, these two trials were counted as practice trials.
The child would then be told of the rules again and the test trials would start all over
again. If the child responded correctly to the first two trials, these were counted as
trials 1 and 2 and the child proceeded with the remaining trials. The total number of
correct responses was scored on a 2-16 scale.
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Results and Discussion
Preliminary analyses.
Measures of SES. In order to determine whether the monolingual and
bilingual children came from similar SES background, statistical analyses were
conducted on the ratios of the mean, median, and variance property valuation between
monolingual and bilingual children. The ratio of the median property valuation
between monolingual and bilingual children was 1: 1.03 and Mann-Whitney U-test
confirmed that these two groups of children came from the same SES backgrounds, Z
= -.83, P > .10. Analyses done on the mean values and the variances of the two
groups further confirmed that these monolingual and bilingual children were drawn
from the same SES population. The ratio of the means was 1:1.51 and t-tests showed
no significant differences between these two groups of children based on the estimated
property valuations, t(27) = -1.16, p > .10. The ratio of the variances was 1:10.81 and
the Levene test of equality in variances revealed that the variance of estimated
property valuations of the monolingual children were significantly lower than the
bilingual children, F(1,27) = 6.30, p < .05. A visual inspection of the data showed that
there were two outliers in the bilingual group. After removing the outliers, the ratio of
the variances was 1: 1.19 and the two group variances no longer differred significantly
from each other, F(1,25) = .01, p > .10 (however, note below that there was no
significant correlation in performance between SES and the experimental task).
Measures of vocabulary, memory span, and inhibitory control. The mean
scores and standard deviations for the PPVT, Digit-Span, and Day-Night Stroop tasks
are shown in Table 1. A one-way ANOVA was conducted to compare the children
71
from the two language groups in these three tasks. No significant effects were found,
all ps > .10. Hence, both groups of children were virtually identical in SES, receptive
vocabulary, short-term memory and inhibitory control skills.
Mean
Age
Language
Status
Receptive Vocab.:
PPVT
Working Memory:
Digit-Span
Inhibitory Control:
Day-Night
3.77
3.68
Monolingual
Bilingual
123.54 (11.47)
117.58 (14.11)
6.29 (1.27)
6.58 (1.98)
13.07 (3.08)
11.25 (3.60)
Table 1. Mean scores and standard deviations (in parentheses) of Peabody Picture
Vocabulary Test (PPVT), Digit-Span task (DS), and Day-Night task (DN) in Study 1.
For the experimental trials, children were given a score of from 0 to 2 that
reflects the number of times they successfully selected the mutually visible object.
Preliminary analyses revealed no effect of order or gender, so they were combined in
subsequent analyses. There were no significant correlations between scores in the
experimental trials and SES, PPVT, Digit-Span, and Day-Night Stroop task (all ps >
.10).
Thus, the monolingual and bilingual children were drawn from identical SES
populations and were comparable in terms of standard measures of vocabulary, short-
term memory, and inhibitory control. Furthermore, none of these measures were
correlated with success on the experimental measures of interest.
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Main results. A 2 (condition: there vs. where) x 2 (language status:
monolingual vs. bilingual) repeated measures ANOVA was conducted (see Table 2).
There was a significant main effect of condition, where children significantly chose
the visible object more often in the “there” trials compared to the “where” trials
(F(1,30) = 25.56, p < .01). There was a marginal significant main effect of language
status, where monolingual children significantly chose the mutually visible object
more often compared to the bilingual children (F(1,30) = 4.03, p = .054). As
predicted, these main effects were modulated by an interaction between condition and
language status (F(1,30) = 5.28, p < .05). Planned comparison t-tests revealed that
while monolingual and bilingual children were equally likely to select the mutually
visible object when the experimenter said “there” (t(30) = .30, p > .10), bilingual
children were more likely to select the hidden object than monolingual children when
the experimenter said “where” (t(30) = 2.73, p < .05). Hence, as predicted, bilingual 3-
year-olds were better in integrating multiple cues, such as eye gaze, context, and
semantics when interpreting a speaker’s referential intent compared to their
monolingual peers.
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Condition Language Status Mean SD
Study 1 There Monolingual
Bilingual
1.75
1.69
0.58
0.60
Where Monolingual
Bilingual
1.38
0.69
0.72
0.70
Study 2 There
- Gesture-only
- Look-only
- Combined
Monolingual
1.56
1.75
1.44
0.63
0.45
0.63
Where
- Gesture-only
- Look-only
- Combined
Monolingual
1.31
1.63
0.75
0.70
0.50
0.68
Table 2. Means and standard deviations of correct responses (out of 2) in Study 1 and
2.
We compared performance against chance. Monolingual children were
significantly above chance in picking the visible object in the “there” trials (t(15) =
5.20, p > .001) and marginally above chance in picking the visible object in the
“where” trials (t(15) = 2.09, p = .054). For the bilingual children, they were also
significantly above chance in picking the visible object in the “there” trials (t(15) =
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4.57, p > .001) but were marginally below chance in picking the visible object in the
“where” trials (t(15) = -1.76, p = .096).
Summary. Study 1 indicated that while all children picked the visible object
equally often when the speaker said “there”, bilingual children were more likely than
monolingual children to pick the other object not looked at when the speaker said
“where”, suggesting that bilingual children were better at integrating multiple cues,
such as eye gaze, context and semantics to understand a speaker’s referential intent.
However, additional information may guide monolingual children in integrating
multiple cues to understand a speaker’s referential intent under similar demands.
Study 2 seeks to explore the kinds of additional cues that would be needed to bring 3-
year-old monolinguals up to the performance of their bilingual peers.
Study 2:
Additional Cues to Facilitate Understanding of Intent
In Study 2, I seek to explore the kinds of cues that would facilitate 3-year-old
monolinguals’ ability to integrate multiple cues to understand a speaker’s referential
intent. In addition to hearing the “there” trials as in Study 1, monolingual children
either saw an additional questioning gesture (palms faced up and raised to shoulder)
(gesture-only condition) or an extra searching look to the side of the box of the hidden
object (look-only condition), or both the questioning gesture and the extra searching
look (combined gestures condition) when they heard the experimenter said “where”.
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Method
Participants. Forty-eight monolingual 3-year-old children from Bing Nursery
School participated in this study. Sixteen of them were randomly assigned to the
gesture-only condition (8 males, mean age = 3.63, range = 3.15-3.98), 16 to the look-
only condition (7 males, mean age = 3.63, range = 3.02-3.99), and the remaining 16 to
the combined-gestures condition (8 males, mean age = 3.53, range = 3.00-3.98).
Materials. The same materials and procedures as per Study 1 were used.
Procedure. The procedures were similar to Study 1 except the experimental
phase. In the gesture-only condition, on the “where” trials, the experimenter provided
an additional questioning gesture (palms faced up and raised to shoulder) when she
said “Where’s the [novel word]?” In the look-only condition, on the “where” trials,
the experimenter provided an extra searching look to the side of the box of the hidden
object when she said “where”. In the combined-gestures condition, on the “where”
trials, the experimenter provided an extra searching look to the side of the box of the
hidden object along with the questioning gesture when she said “where” (see Figure
2). The “there” trials were the same in both conditions.
76
Questioning Gesture:
Searching Look:
Searching Look + Questioning Gesture:
Figure 2. Screenshots from Study 2.
Results and discussion
As in Study 1, children were given a score of from 0 to 2 that reflects the
number of times they successfully selected the mutually visible object. A 2 (condition:
where vs. there trial) x 3 (gesture-type: questioning vs look vs combined) repeated
measures analysis of variance was conducted. There was a significant main effect of
condition, F(1,45) = 14.90, p < .001, where children significantly chose the mutually
+
+ +
+
77
visible object more often in the “there” trials compared to the “where” trials (see Table
2). There was also a significant main effect of gesture-type, F(2,45) = 5.34, p < .05.
Contrasts results (K matrix) showed that children who saw the combined gestures
performed significantly better than those who saw only the extra look (p < .05) and
marginally better than those who saw only the questioning gesture (p < .10). There
was a significant interaction between condition and gesture-type (F(2,45) = 3.45, p <
.05). Children chose the correct object equally well to refer to the mutually visible
object when the experimenter said “there” (all ps > .10). However, when the
experimenter said “where”, children who saw the combined gestures performed better
than those who saw only either one (questioning vs combined: t(30) = 2.29, p < .05,
look vs combined: t(30) = 4.13, p < .001, questioning vs look: t(30) = 1.45, p > .10).
In other words, children who saw two gestures understood better the speaker’s
intention to refer to the hidden object when the experimenter asked “where” compared
to those who saw only one.
To explore whether monolingual children indeed benefited from some form of
gestures to help them understand the speaker’s intention to refer to the hidden object
and whether the additional cues could bring 3-year-old monolinguals up to the
performance of their bilingual peers, further analyses were conducted to compare the
performance of monolingual children with bilingual children (from Study 1). Results
indicated that monolingual children in Study 2 did not benefit from either the
additional questioning gesture or the extra look, and bilinguals from Study 1 who saw
no gesture still outperformed these children in the “where” trials (t(30) = -2.51, p < .05
and t(30) = -4.34, p < .001 respectively). In comparison, with two additional cues
78
combined, monolingual children now became able to retrieve the hidden object when
the experimenter asked “where”, and did as well as the bilinguals in Study 1 (t(30) =
.26, p > .10). Hence, Study 1 and 2 presented evidence that bilingual children are
better able to integrate multiple communicative cues as a function of other co-
occurring cues compared to their monolingual counterparts. Further, monolingual
children need extra cues loaded on each other in a concerted effort to help them
understand a speaker’s referential intent under similar demands.
Nurmsoo and Bloom (2008) has shown, using the same procedure, that 2.5-
year-old children had difficulty in integrating multiple cues to infer a speaker’s
communicative intent and selected the object the speaker looked at regardless of the
semantics (“there” vs. “where”) used given the same social context. Nevertheless,
they found that by 4 years of age, children were successful in integrating the cues to
determine a speaker’s referential intent. The focus of Study 3 is to ask whether this
bilingual advantage would persist even among 4-year-olds who succeeded in
differentiating “there” from “where” questions in Nurmsoo and Bloom (2008), when
tone of voice, yet another source of information about communicative intent, needs to
be taken into account. Tone of voice can provide information such as whether the
speaker is serious or merely playing pretend with them (Reissland & Snow, 1996). A
related pragmatic difference signaled by tone of voice is to distinguish serious
questions about where an object is located when the speaker is trying to find
something versus a more pedagogical playful tone of voice commonly used in picture
book reading where an adult might ask a child “where” something is but the object is
mutually visible and the goal is for the child to display their knowledge.
79
Study 3:
Integrating Eye Gaze, Context, Semantics, and Tone of Voice
In this study, Nurmsoo and Bloom (2008)’s procedure was again adapted to
examine whether 4-year-old children can still succeed when an additional cue, tone of
voice, needs to be integrated with the speaker’s eye gaze, perceptual access, and
semantics of the question. In both conditions speakers asked “where” an object was
but either in a serious tone of voice which indicates the speaker is sincerely wondering
where the object is or in a playful/pedagogical tone of voice that implies the speaker
knows where the object is but wants the child to reveal that knowledge. Integrating all
these cues means we should expect that the speaker is looking for the one that she
cannot see when she asks “where” in a serious, genuine manner, as in Nurmsoo and
Bloom’s study, but that the speaker is referring to the object mutually visible when she
asks “where” in a playful, pedagogical manner. We predicted that 4-year-old
bilinguals would be better than monolingual children at differentiating these two
questions. That is, monolingual and bilingual children alike should succeed at the
serious “where” questions as in the previous work but bilinguals should outperform
monolinguals when the interpretation of the question needs to be modulated by tone of
voice.
Method
Participants. Fifty-eight 4-year-old English monolingual and bilingual
children from Bing Nursery School participated in this study. Twenty-nine were
monolinguals (15 males; mean age = 4.40; range = 4.02-4.91) and 29 were bilinguals
(15 males; mean age = 4.49; range = 4.07-4.96). The language questionnaire and
80
questionnaire coding were the same as used in Study 1. The 29 bilingual children in
the study were reported to have regular exposure to another language besides English,
such as Spanish (n=11), French (n=4), Mandarin (n=4), Korean (n=3), Portuguese,
Hebrew, Japanese, Swedish, Russian, Italian, German, (n=1 per language), mainly
either from parents or a nanny.
Twenty-five adults who received introductory psychology course credit for
their participation (12 females; 13 males) were also recruited to validate the stimuli
used in the study.
Materials. To control for precise manipulation of cues, children were shown
video clips of the Study 1 procedure (see Figure 3). The same Study 1 materials were
used in the video. The procedure of the familiarization phase in the video was the
same as Study 1, where the box was introduced to the child so that the child could see
the toys from both his own and the experimenter’s perspectives. In the experimental
phase, a puppet placed pairs of novel objects in the box while an actor was away.
When the actor returned, she fixed her gaze on the object that she could see and asked
the test question “Oh! Where’s the [novel word]? Where is it?” either in a serious
manner (“serious-where” condition) or in a playful manner (“playful-where”
condition). In the “serious-where” condition, the question was asked in a
conventional, serious, questioning tone-of-voice. In the “playful-where” condition,
the question was asked in a playful, pedagogical manner, similar to how adults behave
when reading picture books to children. In both conditions, the actor then looked up,
reached out her hand, and asked, “Can I have the [novel word]?” There were two pre-
81
determined orders for each condition, counterbalanced for the target object’s location
relative to the window and the position of the window.
“Serious Condition”
Set-up Puppet hiding objects
“Playful Condition”
Figure 3. Screenshots from video clips (Study 3).
In addition, audio clips of all the test questions were abstracted from the video
files using video-audio converter software. A total of 16 audio clips were obtained.
Procedure. The adults were asked to listen to each of the audio clips in a pre-
determined random order and rate whether the speaker sounded serious or playful and
also how confident they were in each of their rating (1 = not confident at all; 5 = very
confident). This was to ascertain that the “serious-where” and “playful-where” video
clips were indeed distinguishable in their prosodic qualities.
82
Children were tested individually in a quiet room in their preschool. The
videos were presented to each child on a LCD monitor. Children first saw the
familiarization video and asked to identify which toy the actor could see and which
she could not see. Next, the experimenter played each of the four videos in the
experimental phase and asked which one of the two objects the actor was looking for.
Children’s responses were recorded. This procedure was repeated until all four
experimental trials have been completed. As in Study 1, we obtained the mean,
median, and variance of property valuation from the residential addresses of the
participants. We also administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-IV, Digit-
Span task, and Day-Night Stroop task to the children.
Results and Discussion
Preliminary analyses.
Validation of tone of voice stimuli. Adults were given a score of from 0 to 16
that reflects the number of times they correctly rated the speaker as sounded serious or
playful. They were also given an average score of from 0 to 5 that reflects their
average confidence level in their ratings. The average total number of items correct
(out of 16) = 14.68, SD = 1.18, and the average confidence score (out of 5) = 4.10, SD
= .46, both were significantly above chance performance (all ps < .01). Adults were
able to distinguish between the “serious-where” and “playful-where” questions with
relatively high confidence.
Measures of SES. As in Study 1, in order to determine whether the
monolingual and bilingual children came from similar SES background, statistical
analyses were conducted on the ratios of the mean, median, and variance property
83
valuation between monolingual and bilingual children. The ratio of the median
property valuation between monolingual and bilingual children was 1:1.11 (Z = -1.21,
P > .10), the ratio of the means was 1:1.18 (t(45) = -1.33, p > .10), and the ratio of the
variances was 1:1.04 (F(1,45) = .010, p > .10), all of which indicated that both groups
of children came from the same SES background.
Measures of vocabulary, memory span, and inhibitory control. The mean
scores and standard deviations for the PPVT, Digit-Span, and Day-Night Stroop tasks
are shown in Table 3. A one-way ANOVA was conducted to compare children from
the two language groups in these three tasks. No significant effects were found for
PPVT and Day-Night task, all ps > .10, but there was a marginal significant effect of
language status in the Digit-Span task, F(1,52) = 2.86, p = .097. Bilingual children,
on average, scored marginally higher than the monolingual children in the Digit-Span
task (however, note below that there was no significant correlation in performance
between the Digit-Span and the experimental task).
Mean
Age
Language
Status
Receptive Vocab.:
PPVT
Working Memory:
Digit-Span
Inhibitory Control:
Day-Night
4.40
4.49
Monolingual
Bilingual
120.93 (11.77)
117.40 (15.22)
6.29 (1.33)
7.12 (2.03)
11.86 (3.58)
11.38 (3.18)
Table 3. Mean scores and standard deviations (in parentheses) of Peabody Picture
Vocabulary Test (PPVT), Digit-Span task (DS), and Day-Night task (DN) in Study 3.
84
For the experimental trials, children were given a score of from 0 to 4 that
reflects the number of times they successfully selected the mutually visible object.
There were no significant correlations between scores in the experimental trials and
SES, PPVT, Digit-Span, and Day-Night Stroop task (all ps > .10).
Thus, monolingual and bilingual children were drawn from identical SES
populations and were comparable in terms of standard measures of vocabulary,
inhibitory control, with the only difference a marginal advantage in digit span.
Moreover, none of these measures were correlated with success on the experimental
measures of interest.
Main results. A univariate ANOVA was conducted with language status
(monolingual vs. bilingual) and condition (serious vs. playful) as fixed factors. There
was a significant interaction effect between language status and condition, (F(1,54) =
4.20, p < .05). No other significant effects were found. Planned comparison t-tests
revealed that bilingual children’s performance was significantly better than that of
monolingual children in the “playful-where” condition but children were equally
successful in the “serious-where” condition (t(26) = 2.16, p < .05; t(26) = .80, p > .10,
respectively) (see Table 4). As predicted, monolingual and bilingual children were
equally likely to select the hidden object when asked “where” in a serious, genuine
manner, but bilingual children were more likely than monolingual children to select
the mutually visible object when asked “where” in a playful, pedagogical manner. No
other significant effects were found.
85
Condition Language Status Mean SD
Serious-Where Monolingual
Bilingual
1.73
1.33
1.39
1.35
Playful-Where Monolingual
Bilingual
1.50
2.50
1.22
1.22
Table 4. Means and standard deviations of correct responses (out of 2) in Study 3.
We also compared performance against chance. Monolingual children were at
chance picking the visible object both in the “playful” and “serious” conditions (t(13)
= -1.53, p > .10 and t(14) = -.75, p > .10 respectively). While the bilingual children
were at chance in picking the visible object in the “playful” trials, they were
marginally below chance in picking the visible object in the “serious” trials (t(13) =
1.53, p > .10 and t(14) = -1.92, p = .076, respectively).
Summary. Study 3 drew upon similar tasks as Study 1 but included an
additional cue, tone of voice, such that the speaker said “where” in either a serious,
genuine manner, or a playful, pedagogical manner. Integrating a speaker’s eye gaze,
context and semantics of the utterance and tone of voice thus implied that the speaker
was sincerely looking for the hidden object that she could not see when she asked in a
serious, genuine manner but that she wanted the child to pick the object she was
looking at when she asked in a playful, pedagogical manner. We found that while
monolingual and bilingual 4-year-old children were equally likely to select the hidden
86
object when asked “where” in a serious, genuine manner, bilingual children were more
likely than monolingual children to select the mutually visible object when asked
“where” in a playful, pedagogical manner.
The above studies provided evidence that bilingual children are more
sophisticated in using multiple cues to determine a speaker’s referential intent.
However, little is known how children would integrate communicative cues, such as
co-referential localizing gestures, with other speech internal cues (e.g. order-of
mention), in interpreting ambiguous and context-sensitive words, such as pronouns.
Previous results indicated that children showed successful pronoun resolution based
on gender information but did not show an adult-like order-of-mention bias, that is, a
tendency to interpret ambiguous pronouns as co-referential with the subject, or first-
mentioned entity (e.g. Brener, 1983; Song & Fisher, 2005; Arnold et al., 2007;
Stevenson et al.; 1994). Study 4 examines the use of gestures to help children
disambiguate the right referent involving pronouns.
Study 4:
Integrating Gestures with Speech Internal Cues in Pronoun Interpretation
Study 4 examines how children make use of communicative cues (such as co-
referential localizing gesture) with co-occurring speech cues (e.g. order-of-mention) to
infer the referent object in face of an ambiguous pronoun. A modified version of the
Arnold et al. (2007) procedures was paired with co-referential localizing gestures to
examine whether monolingual and bilingual children show an order-of-mention bias
(or lack of), and most importantly, to what extent monolingual and bilingual children
87
use gestures to help them identify the right referent of the pronoun.
Method
Participants. Thirty-two 4-year-old English monolingual and bilingual
children from Bing Nursery School participated in this study. Sixteen were
monolinguals (9 males; mean age = 4.58; range = 4.02-4.99) and 16 were bilinguals (9
males; mean age = 4.45; range = 4.02-4.94). The language questionnaire and
questionnaire coding were the same as used in Study 1. The 16 bilingual children in
the study were reported to have regular exposure to another language besides English,
such as Spanish (n=7), Mandarin (n=2), Russian (n=2), French, Italian, Thai, Japanese,
and German (n=1 per language), mainly either from parents or a nanny.
Twenty adults who received introductory psychology course credit for their
participation (9 females; 13 males) were also recruited to obtain an adult comparison
for the study.
Materials. There were 14 pairs of pictures of (cartoon) animal characters, two
pairs for warm-up trials and 12 pairs for experimental trials. The animal characters had
clothing and accessories that match their intended gender. For example, a female cat
had a pink bow on its head and a necklace around its neck, while a male pig had a
straw hat and brown-checkered white shirt. The female animal characters were: duck,
owl, reindeer, bear, bunny, kitty, chick, and mouse. The male animal characters were:
penguin, teddy, frog, panda, raccoon, bear, dog, and pig. The pictures were laminated,
size 13 cm x 13 cm each. In addition, a card-holding structure was constructed to
control for distances between pairs of pictures and between pictures and the
experimenter. The structure consisted of two 12 cm x 13 cm white boards and a 2 cm
88
by 31 cm white strip of cardboard. The two white boards were inclined backwards an
angle of approximately 45o from the child’s view and held 30 cm apart from each
other. The white strip of cardboard extended from the middle of the two white boards
towards the experimenter. These pairs of pictures remained visible to the children
throughout the trial, potentially freeing up mental resources such as working memory,
to the experimental tasks (see Ballard, Hayhoe, Pook, & Rao, 1997). This also served
as a visual reminder of the gender of the characters, which was held constant for each
pair of animals in each trial.
Procedure. Children were tested individually in a quiet room in their
preschool. Children were told that they were going to play a giving game. For each
trial, a pair of pictures was introduced to the children (e.g. “This is Miss Owl and this
is Miss Ducky) and children were asked to confirm the identity of the characters (e.g.
“So, can you tell me which one is Miss Owl…. And which one is Miss Ducky?”).
One child was excluded from the study as he failed to answer both questions correctly.
The experimenter then placed the pictures on the card-holding structure and said a
two-sentence story to the children. The first sentence of each story mentioned the two
characters doing some reciprocal action (e.g. “Miss Owl is going out with Miss
Ducky”), and a palm-up gesture was used on each of the two characters as the
experimenter spoke. Reciprocal predicates such as the above, could avoid confounds
with thematic roles that might alter the first-mentioned bias (e.g. Garvey &
Caramazza, 1974) and make first-mentioned character more accessible for reference
with pronouns (Arnold & Griffin, 2007). The second sentence of the story then
explained that one character wanted a particular item. In this instance, the same palm-
89
up gesture was used with either one or none of the two characters as the experimenter
spoke, depending on which type of trial it was. In the warm-up trials, the name of the
target character was mentioned clearly to indicate it as the target referent and the
gesture was used in consistent with the proper name (e.g. “Miss Owl/Ducky wants the
bag.”) In the experimental trials, there were three conditions: neutral, gesture-1st, and
gesture-2nd. In all three conditions, a pronoun consistent with the gender of both the
characters was used instead of the proper name (e.g. “He wants the ball.”). No gesture
was used in the neutral condition in the second sentence. The palm-up gesture was
used with the first character in the gesture-1st condition and with the second character
in the gesture-2nd condition as the experimenter spoke (see Figure 4).
Figure 4. Screenshots from Study 4.
The experimenter then presented a doll-sized paper object with sticky tape
behind and asked the child, “Here it is. Can you give it to him/her?” The child
90
responded by picking up the paper object and sticking it on one of the two animal
characters. During each trial, the experimenter maintained eye contact with the child.
If the child asked for confirmation or clarification, the experimenter said “Which one
do you think wants it?”
Each session consisted of two warm-up trials and 12 experimental trials. The
animal characters and the target referent in the two warm-up trials were
counterbalanced for side. There were 16 different orders for the experimental trials.
Each order began with a trial from a different condition in a pre-determined
randomized schedule, counterbalanced for side, gender, and condition, and with the
restriction that two of the first six experimental trials must come from each of three
conditions. The orders were randomly assigned to each participant in a way that was
balanced across gender, age and language groups.
As in Study 1, we obtained the mean, median, and variance of property
valuation from the residential addresses of the participants. We also administered the
Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-IV, Digit-Span task, and Day-Night Stroop task to
the children.
The adults were asked to do the exact same procedures.
Results and Discussion
Preliminary analyses.
Measures of SES. As in Study 1, in order to determine whether the
monolingual and bilingual children came from similar SES background, statistical
analyses were conducted on the ratios of the mean, median, and variance property
valuation between monolingual and bilingual children. The ratio of the median
91
property valuation between monolingual and bilingual children was 1:1.03 (Z = -.15 P
> .10), the ratio of the means was 1:1.02 (t(25) = .092, p > .10), and the ratio of the
variances was 1:0.54 (F(1,25) = 2.13, p > .10), all of which indicated that both groups
of children came from the same SES background.
Measures of vocabulary, memory span, and inhibitory control. The mean
scores and standard deviations for the PPVT, Digit-Span, and Day-Night Stroop tasks
are shown in Table 5. A one-way ANOVA was conducted to compare children from
the two language groups in these three tasks. No significant effects were found for all
three tasks, all ps > .10. Hence, both groups of children were virtually identical in
SES, receptive vocabulary, short-term memory and inhibitory control skills.
Mean
Age
Language
Status
Receptive Vocab.:
PPVT
Working Memory:
Digit-Span
Inhibitory Control:
Day-Night
4.58
4.45
Monolingual
Bilingual
122.73 (10.68)
115.19 (14.12)
6.47 (1.19)
6.13 (1.89)
12.00 (2.70)
12.13 (2.68)
Table 5. Mean scores and standard deviations (in parentheses) of Peabody Picture
Vocabulary Test (PPVT), Digit-Span task (DS), and Day-Night task (DN) in Study 4.
For the experimental trials, children were given a score of from 0 to 4 that
reflects the number of times they selected the character that was first mentioned.
There were no significant correlations between scores in the experimental trials and
SES, PPVT, Digit-Span, and Day-Night Stroop task (all ps > .10).
92
Thus, the monolingual and bilingual children were drawn from identical SES
populations and were comparable in terms of standard measures of vocabulary,
inhibitory control, and short-term memory. Moreover, none of these measures were
correlated with success on the experimental measures of interest.
Main results.
Adults’ data. An omnibus repeated measures ANOVA was conducted with
condition as within-subjects factor, and gender and order as between-subjects factors.
There was no significant effect of gender and order, hence these were combined in
subsequent analyses (ps > .10). A repeated measures ANOVA was conducted with
condition as the within-subjects factor (condition: neutral vs. gesture-1st vs. gesture-
2nd). The effect of condition was significant, F(2,42) = 22.21, p < .01). Paired-sample
t-tests revealed that adults chose the first-mentioned character more when the gesture
was consistent with the first-mentioned character than when there was no gesture
(t(21) = 2.32, p < .05), or when the gesture was consistent with the second-mentioned
character (t(21) = 5.19, p < .01) (see Table 6). Adults also chose the first-mentioned
character more when there was no gesture than when the gesture was consistent with
the second-mentioned character (t(21) = 4.41, p < .05). One-sample t-tests showed
that adults chose the first-mentioned character significantly above chance when there
was no gesture as well as when the gesture was consistent with the first-mentioned
character (t(21) = 14.72, p < .05; t(21) = -10.00, p < .01 respectively). On the other
hand, adults were at chance in choosing the first-mentioned character when the gesture
was consistent with the second-mentioned character (t(21) = -.80, p > .10). Consistent
with prior results (e.g. Arnold et al., 2006), adults showed an order-of-mention bias by
93
choosing the first-mentioned character in the neutral condition. Adults showed more
confidence in choosing the first-mentioned character when the experimenter’s gesture
was consistent with this bias. However, adults did not follow the experimenter’s
gesture when the gesture was targeted at the second-mentioned character consistently,
but they also did not persist in choosing the first-mentioned character either, indicating
a general awareness of the experimenter’s gesture but exhibited a sense of uncertainty
when the gesture conflicted with order-of-mention bias.
Children’s data. A 3 (condition: neutral vs. gesture-1st vs. gesture-2nd) x 2
(language status: monolingual vs. bilingual) repeated measures ANOVA was
conducted. There was a significant main effect of condition, F(2,60) = 11.90, p < .01).
Paired-sample t-tests revealed that children chose the first-mentioned character more
when the gesture was consistent with the first-mentioned character (gesture-1st
condition) than when there was no gesture (neutral condition) or when the gesture was
consistent with the second-mentioned character (gesture-2nd condition) (both ps < .01)
(see Table 6). There was a marginal significant interaction effect between language
status and condition, (F(1,60) = 3.08, p = .053). Planned comparison t-tests revealed
that bilingual children chose the second-mentioned character more than monolingual
children when the gesture was consistent with the second-mentioned character but no
difference in other conditions (gesture-2nd: t(30) = 2.01, p = .053; gesture-1st: t(30) =
.51, p > .10; neutral: t(30) = .89, p > .10). Monolingual and bilingual children were
equally likely to select the first-mentioned object either when there was no gesture, or
when the gesture was consistent with the first-mentioned character, but bilingual
children were more likely than monolingual children to select the second-mentioned
94
object when the gesture was consistent with the second-mentioned character. These
results suggest that bilingual children selected the second-mentioned object more than
monolingual children likely because they were more willing to interpret the character
that the experimenter gestured at was the target referent, rather than due to a weaker
order-of-mention bias compared to monolingual children.
Condition Participants Mean SD
No-Gesture Monolingual
Bilingual
Adults
2.25
2.50
3.73
0.86
0.73
0.55
Gesture-1st Mentioned Monolingual
Bilingual
Adults
2.94
3.13
4.00
1.00
1.09
0.00
Gesture-2nd Mentioned Monolingual
Bilingual
Adults
2.31
1.56
2.23
1.08
1.03
1.60
Table 6. Means and standard deviations of 1st-mentioned character responses
(out of 4) of in Study 4.
We also compared performance against chance to examine whether children
have a first-order mention bias (neutral condition) and whether gesture was used to
identify the referent target (gesture-1st and gesture-2nd conditions). Monolingual
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children were at chance picking the first-mentioned character both in the neutral and
gesture-2nd conditions (t(15) = 1.17, p > .10 and t(15) = 1.16, p > .10 respectively), but
were significantly above chance picking the first-mentioned character in the gesture-
1st condition (t(15) = 3.76, p < .01). Monolingual children did not seem to have a
first-order mention bias (as consistent with previous studies, Arnold et al., 2006) but
gesture did help these children to identify the first mentioned character (gesture-1st
condition) but not the second mentioned character (gesture-2nd condition). Bilingual
children, on the other hand, were at chance picking the first-mentioned object in the
gesture-2nd condition (t(15) = -1.70, p > .10), but were significantly above chance
picking the first-mentioned character in the neutral and gesture-1st condition (t(15) =
2.74, p < .05 and t(15) = 4.14, p < .01 respectively). These children seemed to have a
burgeoning first-order mention bias just like adults and were able to use gesture to
pick the first-mentioned object (gesture-1st). They also showed some level of
sensitivity to the gesture, like adults, when the gesture was targeted at the second-
mentioned character.
In order to further examine whether a pre-existing bias of using order-of-
mention cues affects the use of gesture in pronoun interpretation, we grouped children
into those who did not show an order-of-mention (OM) bias (scored 2 or less out of 4
in the neutral trials) and those who showed some order-of-mention bias (scored 3 or
more out of 4 in the neutral trials). We ran a 3 (condition: neutral vs. gesture-1st vs.
gesture-2nd) x 2 (language status: monolingual vs. bilingual) repeated measures
ANOVA separately for the two groups. For the no-OM bias group, there was a
significant effect of condition (F(2,32) = 4.77, p < .05). Children chose the first-
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mentioned character significantly more when the experimenter provided a gesture with
the first-mentioned character than when the experimenter provided the gesture with
the second-mentioned character (M of gesture-1st = 2.65; M of neutral = 1.79; M of
gesture-2nd = 1.86; ps < .01). No other significant effects were found. For the OM
bias group, there was also a significant effect of condition (F(2,24) = 12.14, p < .01).
Children chose the first-mentioned character significantly more when the experimenter
provided a gesture with the first-mentioned character than when the experimenter
provided the gesture with the second-mentioned character (M of gesture-1st = 3.46; M
of neutral = 3.15; M of gesture-2nd = 2.08; p < .01). In addition, there was a significant
interaction effect between language status and condition, (F(2,24) = 4.60, p < .05).
Paired-sample t-tests revealed that while monolingual children were equally like to
choose the first-mentioned character regardless whether gesture was used or not (all ps
> .05), bilingual children significantly differentiated their choice depending on the
condition, that is, they chose the first-mentioned object more in the gesture-1st
condition and second-mentioned object more in the gesture-2nd condition (all ps <
.05).
Summary. Adults showed a strong order-of-mention bias, consistent with
other studies, choosing the first-mentioned character in the neutral condition. Gesture
seemed to confirm the use of such bias, as adults chose the first-mentioned character
more when the gesture was targeted at the first-mentioned character. Adults also
showed sensitivity to the experimenter’s gesture even when the gesture was targeted at
the second-mentioned character, but they were unsure whether to follow order-of-
mention bias or experimenter’s gesture when these cues conflicted. Children,
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monolingual and bilingual alike, too, chose the first-mentioned character more when
the gesture was targeted at the first-mentioned character than when it was not.
However, bilingual children showed more adult-like responses than monolingual
children, including a burgeoning order-of-mention bias and differentiated responses
when order-of-mention bias was conflicted with gesture. In sum, bilinguals indicated
a greater level of sensitivity to the experimenter’s gesture than monolinguals.
Studies 1, 2, 3, and 4 explored how the experience of growing up bilingual
fosters children’s ability to modulate the use of multiple communicative cues in
various contexts. However, one critical research question left unanswered is exactly
how and what in the bilingual process facilitates this precocious ability to integrate
multiple cues to determine a speaker’s referential intent. Growing up in a
linguistically varied environment increases the cognitive demands of children to
process communication appropriately, where there is a greater chance of a
communication breakdown when a speaker inadvertently switch or mix a language a
listener may not understand. Hence, the experience of a communication breakdown
of such a nature may heighten children’s sensitivity to a speaker’s communicative
cues in a bid to maintain communicative effectiveness. Study 5 serves to examine
this hypothesis.
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Study 5:
Intervention – Experiencing Communication Breakdown
Study 5 examines whether the experience of a communication breakdown may
increase children’s sensitivity to communicative cues. This is achieved by introducing
a communication challenge that is typically present in a bilingual environment (mixing
foreign words in an English utterance) to induce a state of uncertainty as to what the
speaker is talking about, and then introducing a situation where there is a need for
children to make use of a speaker’s cues in order to achieve a successful outcome. In
this latter situation, we followed the procedure in Yow and Markman (2009a) where
children were asked to locate a hidden object in one of two boxes during which an
experimenter provided a cue (pointing to or gazing at the correct box) while seated
either equidistant between the two boxes or behind the empty box. In Yow and
Markman (2009a), we found that 3- and 4-year-old bilingual children were better able
than their monolingual peers to use the experimenter’s cues to locate the hidden toy in
the most challenging condition – experimenter looked at the correct box but seated
behind the empty box (body-biased gaze trials). Hence we predicted that children who
have experienced communication challenges of a bilingual nature would perform
better than children who have not experienced such challenges in the body-biased gaze
trials only. We then followed up with the same children to examine whether such
benefit (if any) would yield similar successful outcome about one month later.
Method
Participants. Sixty-four 3- & 4-year-old English monolingual children from
Bing Nursery School participated in this study (mean age = 4.09; range = 3.16-4.97;
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32 3-year-olds; 32 males). Of the 64 children from Session 1, 5 children did not
participate in Session 2 (3 from control condition and 2 from experimental condition),
either because they were absent from school or engaged in other activities. The final
group of participants for Session 2 consisted of 59 children from Session 1 (mean age
= 4.10; range = 3.16-4.97; 29 3-year-olds; 29 males).
Materials. The materials used in the study consisted of two identical opaque
boxes (17.5 cm x 20 cm x 9 cm), a cardboard screen (50 cm x 116.5 cm), two
cardboard stands with slots for the screen (20 cm x 29 cm x 9 cm), two bags of toys
(one for each session), and a chute-like structure (21 cm x 21 cm x 25 cm). The boxes
had lids that could be easily lifted off to hide or retrieve objects. In addition, to
eliminate any sound that might be generated from the hiding process and thus give a
clue to the child where the toy could be hidden, a layer of non-skid cushion was taped
to the entire inner bottom of each box. The chute-like structure was made from an
opaque box with a sloping chute sticking out on the top and an opening on one side for
conveying things out to the floor. The inside of the chute consisted of a xylophone that
made sounds as the toy slid through the chute. The toys in the two bags, consisted of
nine items each, were chosen to fit the chute’s opening and to have sufficient variety
to maintain the child’s interest.
Design. The study consisted of two parts: setting up the game together, and
playing the hide-and-find-it game. Figure 5 and 6 presents a schematic diagram of the
set-up for each of the two parts. The first part consisted of two types of between-
subjects conditions: control and experimental conditions:
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Control condition. In the control condition, the experimenter requested the
child to help set up the game together, using a single language, English, throughout the
whole procedure.
Experimental condition. In the experimental condition, the experimenter
similarly requested the child to help set up the game together, but each request was an
English sentence mixed with some foreign words. In this study, Japanese words were
used because it was determined that none of the children in the study had prior
exposure to the language, and hence minimize any confounds due to familiarity with a
language.
Figure 5. Set-up of Study 5 Part One.
Experimenter
Child
Table
Screen
Chair
Chair
Boxes
Bag of toys
Chute
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Figure 6. Set-up of Study 5 Part Two.
The second part consisted of four types of within-subjects test trials: body-
centered with point, body-biased with point, body-centered with gaze, and body-
biased with gaze (see Figure 7):
Body-centered point trials. For body-centered point trials, the experimenter
was positioned equidistant from the two boxes, extended part of her arm and pointed
to the baited box while fixing her gaze on the marked dot. The point was made so that
the tip of her finger was approximately 25 cm from the correct box and 62 cm from
the incorrect box.
Body-biased point trials. In the body-biased point trial, the gesture was
similar to the body-centered-point trial, except that the experimenter sat directly
behind the empty box and gestured to the farther but correct box. The point was made
so that the tip of her finger was approximately equidistant from the two boxes.
Experimenter
74 cm
20 cm
Child
75 cm
35 cm
Box
Screen
X
x
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Body-centered gaze trials. For body-centered gaze trials, the position of the
experimenter was exactly the same as body-centered point trials, except that instead of
pointing with her finger, the experimenter turned her head to look along the line of
gaze toward the correct box and kept her hands either behind her back or in her lap.
Body-biased gaze trials. In the body-biased gaze trial, the gesture was the
same as the body-centered gaze trial, and the experimenter position was the same as
the body-biased point trials.
In all trials, the position of the boxes, the participant’s location and the
experimenter’s distance from the boxes remained in the same locations as described in
Yow and Markman (2009a) (see Figure 6). In addition, a small dot was marked on the
center of the table along the position of the screen to serve as a neutral location on
which the experimenter fixed her gaze in both the point trials.
Figure 7. Schematic representation of the four types of test trials in Study 5 Part Two.
Centered-Point Biased-Point
Centered-Gaze Biased-Gaze
X
X
X
X
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Procedure.
Session 1, part 1 – setting up the game. The cardboard screen, the two boxes,
the chute, and a bag of toys were placed close together on the floor of the room. The
two cardboard stands were placed on the table. The experimenter explained to the
child that they were going to play a “hide-and-find-it” game together but needed the
child’s help to set up the game. There were four such “helping” trials. For each
“helping” trial, the experimenter requested the same helping behavior twice, the first
with a distal point to the target object and the second a proximal point. For example, in
the control condition, the experimenter would say to the child, “Can you bring me the
big piece of cardboard, please?”, pointing to the cardboard, amongst other things, from
a distance, and then moving nearer to the cardboard and repeating the same request,
now pointing unambiguously to the cardboard. The “helping” trials were identical in
the experimental condition, except that the sentences were now mixed with some
foreign words (e.g. “Can you bring me the oh-ki-na, a-tsu-ga-mi, please?) Each child
was randomly assigned to either the control or experimental condition. The
experimenter thanked the child for helping and proceeded with the next helping trial.
Session 1, part 2 – playing the game. The experimenter told the child that
they were now ready to play the game together.
Warm up. During the warm up period, the experimenter asked the child to
pick a toy from the bag, placed the toy in one of the boxes while the child watched,
and then asked the child to locate the missing toy. When the child located the toy, the
experimenter explained that the toy could be placed into the chute and would make
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sounds as the toy slides through it. After one trial of warm up, the experimenter
proceeded with the actual testing.
Testing. During the actual testing, each child received eight trials within a
single session. There were two trials from each of the four trial types,
counterbalanced for side. There were four different orders. Each order began with a
trial from a different condition in a pre-determined randomized schedule. The orders
were randomly assigned to each participant in a way that was balanced across gender,
age and language groups.
The screen was always up before the start of every trial. The experimenter
asked the child to pick a toy from the bag. While seated behind the screen equidistant
from the two boxes, she hid the toy carefully to minimize any sound or movement that
might indicate the correct location of the toy. The experimenter glanced at a mirror
located at one side of the room a few times to check that the child did not peek and
could not see her hiding actions. She positioned her chair according to the trial type
(e.g. stayed seated in the center if the trial was a body-centered trial, but moved her
chair inconspicuously behind the incorrect box if the trial was a body-biased trial.)
She then checked to make sure that the child was looking at her direction before
removing the screen and asked the child “Can you find it now?” (or “Can you find it
for me now?”) and pointed to or looked at the correct box while she spoke. If the
child were not looking at the experimenter’s direction before removing the screen, she
would call out the child’s name to get his or her attention before proceeding. She held
her gestures while the child made a choice. The decision rule for the children having
made a choice was when they moved a lid on either of the boxes. Pilot trials revealed
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that most children, upon having chosen the empty box, naturally approached the
second (correct) box to retrieve the toy without prompting. So, to standardize the
procedure, all children were encouraged to retrieve the toy from the second box if the
initial box was an empty one (e.g. “Where is the toy?”) After the toy was retrieved, the
child was praised and encouraged to slide the toy into the chute. This procedure was
repeated for the remaining trials.
Session 2 – playing the game 3-4 weeks later. The same children were
brought back about 3-4 weeks later and asked to play the same game again. For
Session 2, the game was already set up and the experimenter proceeded with one
warm up trial and eight test trials in the same order the child had in Session 1.
Results and discussion
Session 1. In each of the four types of test trials, children were given a score of
from 0 to 2 that reflected the number of times they successfully selected the correct
box. Table 7 presents the average total number of times (out of 2) a child chose the
correct box in each trial type by condition. Preliminary analyses revealed no effect of
order or gender, so they were combined in subsequent analyses.
As our earlier study using a similar game procedure found that bilingual
children were performed better than monolingual children only in the most
challenging trial type: body-biased gaze trials (Yow & Markman, 2009a), we
predicted that children in the experimental condition, who experienced a
communication challenge of a bilingual nature, would also perform better than
children in the control condition in the body-biased gaze trials only.
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A 2 (type of cue: point vs. gaze) x 2 (body position: centered vs. biased) x 2
(condition: control vs. experimental) x 2 (age: 3-year-old vs. 4-year-old) repeated
measures ANOVA was conducted. There was a significant main effect of type of
cue, F(1,60) = 7.54, p < .01. Children performed better when the cue provided was a
point rather than gaze, suggesting that gaze is a more subtle communicative gesture
than the point (see Table 7). Unexpectedly, there was a significant main effect of
condition, F(1,60) = 19.54, p < .001. Children in the experimental condition who
heard a mixed utterance of English and Japanese performed better across all test trial-
types than children in the control condition who heard just English. There was also a
significant interaction between type of cue, body position and condition, F(1,60) =
4.91, p < .05. Post-hoc independent sample t-tests showed that children in the
experimental condition performed significantly better than children in the control
condition in the body-centered point and body-biased gaze trials (t(62) = 3.70, p <
.001, t(62) = 3.70, p < .001 respectively), marginal in body-centered gaze trials (t(62)
= 1.70, p < .10), but not significantly different in the body-biased point trials (t(62) =
1.17, p > .10). No other significant differences were found.
We also compared performance against chance. Children in the control
condition chose the correct box significantly above chance in the body-biased point
trials (t(31) = 3.00, p < .01), but were at chance in the other three types of trials (body-
centered point: t(31) = 1.65, p > .10; body-centered gaze: t(31) = .83, p > .10, and
body-biased gaze: t(31) = -0.30, p > .10). Again, this was unexpected, as monolingual
children in our earlier study were above chance in all trial types except the body-
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biased gaze trials. In contrast, children in the experimental condition chose the correct
box significantly above chance in all trial-types ((all ps < .001).
Point Gaze
Body-centered Body-biased Body-centered Body-biased
Session 1
Control 1.21 (.71) 1.38 (.69) 1.09 (.65) 0.97 (.61)
Experimental 1.78 (.44) 1.59 (.57) 1.41 (.57) 1.53 (.63)
Session 2
Control 1.69 (.47) 1.59 (.57) 1.52 (.51) 1.14 (.74)
Experimental 1.70 (.60) 1.60 (.62) 1.60 (.56) 1.50 (.57)
Yow & Markman (2009a)
Monolingual 1.58 (.65) 1.63 (.49) 1.58 (.50) 1.08 (.72)
Bilingual 1.71 (.46) 1.63 (.49) 1.42 (.72) 1.58 (.50)
Table 7. Means and standard deviations (in parentheses) of correct responses (out of
2) in Study 5.
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Session 2. Children were brought back for Session 2 to play the game
approximately one month later (M = 23.95 days, SD = 2.64). A 2 (type of cue: point
vs. gaze) x 2 (body position: centered vs. biased) x 2 (condition: control vs.
experimental) x 2 (age: 3-year-old vs. 4-year-old) repeated measures ANOVA was
conducted. There was a significant main effect of type of cue, F(1,55) = 8.19, p < .01.
Children performed better when the cue provided was a point rather than gaze,
suggesting again that gaze is a more subtle communicative gesture than the point.
There was a significant main effect of body position, F(1,55) = 6.66, p < .05. Children
performed better when the cue was provided in a centered position rather than in a
biased position. There was also a significant interaction effect between cue and age,
F(1,55) = 6.47, p < .05. Post-hoc t-tests showed that older children performed
similarly as the younger children when the cue was a point but were better than the
younger children when the cue was a gaze, t(57) = .92, p > .10 for point and t(57) = -
2.02, p < .05 for gaze (3-year-old: point M = 1.70, SD = .43, gaze M = 1.32, SD = .52;
4-year-old: point M = 1.59, SD = .52, gaze M = 1.57, SD = .44). No other significant
effects were found. However, planned t-tests conducted for condition by cue by
position revealed that children in the control condition were similar in performance as
children in the experimental condition for all trial types except the body-biased gaze
trials (t(57) = -2.24, p < .05; for all other trial types, ps > .10). In other words,
children in the experimental condition performed significantly better than children in
the control condition during Session 2 only in the most challenging trial type: body-
biased gaze trials. This pattern of results is similar to our earlier study where we
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found that 3- and 4-year-old bilinguals performed significantly better than
monolinguals only in the body-biased gaze trials (see Table 7).
We also compared performance against chance. Children in the control
condition chose the correct box significantly above chance in all trial types except the
body-biased gaze trials (body-centered point: t(28) = 7.89, p < .001; body-biased
point: t(28) = 5.56, p < .001; body-centered gaze: t(28) = 5.48, p < .001; body-biased
gaze trials: t(28) = 1.00, p > .10). Again, this pattern of results is similar to the
monolingual children in our earlier study. In contrast, children in the experimental
condition chose the correct box significantly above chance in all trial-types (all ps <
.001).
We also compared performance in Session 1 with Session 2 (to see if there is a
general improvement or whether the benefit specific to experimental condition
persisted beyond immediate context). A 2 (type of cue: point vs. gaze) x 2 (body
position: centered vs. biased) x 2 (condition: control vs. experimental) x 2 (time: time
1 vs. time 2) repeated measures ANOVA was conducted. There was a significant main
effect of time, F(1,57) = 12.36, p < .01. Children performed better in Session 2 than
Session 1, suggesting that all children learned and benefited from the familiarity of the
game. There was a significant interaction effect between time and condition, F(1,57)
= 7.41, p < .05. Children in the control condition performed significantly better in time
2 than time 1, whereas performance of children in the experimental condition
remained the same. No other significant effects of time were found.
In sum, preschoolers successfully used a speaker’s cues such as pointing and
gaze to locate hidden objects, but they found it generally more challenging when the
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gesture provided was gaze instead of a point. Most importantly, we found that
children who had experienced communication failure earlier were overall better able
to utilize the speaker’s cues in the context of a hiding game than children who had no
communication failure (Session 1). However, this overall advantage diminished after
one month for all trial types except the most challenging trial: body-biased gaze trials
(Session 2). In other words, children who did not experience communication failure
were now performing just as well as children who had prior experience of
communication failure in most trials, but remained relatively unsuccessful in the most
challenging trials that children at this age were previously shown to have difficulty
with. In contrast, children who had prior experience of communication failure
remained able to utilize the experimenter’s cues successfully to locate a hidden toy in
these challenging trials.
The results suggested that the experience of communication failure, at least of
a bilingual nature, may have increased children’s sensitivity to a speaker’s
communicative cues and influenced them to use these cues effectively to determine a
speaker’s communicative intent in the immediate context of the game. Note, however,
that (monolingual) children in the control condition, who did not experience
communication failure of a bilingual nature, performed worse than monolingual
children in our earlier study in most trial types (Yow & Markman, 2009a). One
possible explanation is that the experimenter’s “overly helpful” behavior during the set
up of the game in the context of a familiar language (repeated points and moved body
an attempt to disambiguate an unambiguous referent at each “helping” trial) might
have induced an expectation of the experimenter to continue such “helpful” behavior
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during the game. Therefore, it is plausible that when the experimenter did not
continue to show clear, unambiguous cues during the game, children in the control
condition were negatively affected by this “sudden” absence of supporting cues and
did not perform well across all trial types. Besides familiarity of the game, this is also
a possible reason why children in the control condition were able to perform as well as
monolingual children in our previous study in Session 2 (but not Session 1), because
they were asked to play the game without the need to help the experimenter to set up
the game.
Thus, these findings suggested that the overall impact of communication
challenge on children’s sensitivity to a speaker’s cues in Session 1 was rather transient
and fragile, as this overall level of heightened awareness was no longer distinguishing
the two groups of children’s performance after one month. Yet, most importantly,
despite an increased in familiarity of the game in Session 2, children who had prior
experiences of a communication failure (of a bilingual nature) one month ago
continued to perform better than children without such prior experience in the most
challenging trial type: body-biased gaze trials in Session 2. This result is strikingly
similar to our earlier study using the same game procedure (Yow and Markman,
2009a), where we found that 3- and 4-year-old bilinguals performed significantly
better than monolinguals only in the body-biased gaze trials. This suggests that the
experience of a communication breakdown (of a bilingual nature) plays an important
role in heightening children’s sensitivity to a speaker’s communicative cues in a bid to
maintain communicative effectiveness.
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CHAPTER 3
GENERAL DISCUSSION
The present research examined how monolingual and bilingual children differ
in their ability to integrate multiple cues to understand a speaker’s referential intent,
and how the experience of a communication breakdown may increase children’s
sensitivity to communicative cues. The research seeks to understand the contribution
of experience (growing up bilingual) in children’s cognitive development. More
specifically, I used childhood bilingualism as a natural experiment to examine the role
of experience in communicative challenges in developing skills needed to accurately
interpret a speaker’s referential intent. In this section of the paper, I first summarize
the findings I have found in my research, and then put forward an argument of the role
of experience in developing skills via self-generated efforts to cope with
communicative challenges. Finally, I will end the paper with a conclusion of this
dissertation research.
Summary of Findings
Study 1 investigated whether monolingual and bilingual children were able to
integrate a speaker’s eye gaze, context of the speaker’s perceptual access, and
semantics of an utterance in order to respond correctly to the speaker’s request. Pairs
of novel objects were placed in a speaker’s absence, such that one of the objects was
visible to both the child and the speaker, but the other one was only visible to the child
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(contextual cue). When the speaker returned, she looked at the mutually visible object
(eye gaze cue) and requested for an object using a novel label by either saying
“There’s the [novel word]!” or “Where’s the [novel word]?” (semantics cue). This task
required children to integrate the above cues to understand which object the speaker is
referring to, such that we should expect that the speaker is referring to the mutually
visible object when she looked at it and said “there”, but that the speaker is looking for
the other one that she could not see when she said “where”. Results indicated that
bilingual children were better able to modulate the use of these communicative cues as
a function of other co-occurring cues compared to their monolingual counterparts.
While all children picked the visible object equally often when the speaker said
“there”, bilingual children were more likely than monolingual children to pick the
other object not looked at when the speaker said “where”, suggesting that bilingual
children were better at integrating multiple cues, such as context, eye gaze, and
semantics to understand a speaker’s referential intent.
Study 2 examined whether additional information may guide monolingual
children to successfully integrate these cues under similar situations. Extra cues
included a questioning gesture, an extra searching look, or both the questioning
gesture and searching looking. Results indicated that monolingual children benefited
only when two cues were presented in concerted effort, but not when only one cue was
presented.
Study 3 drew upon similar tasks as Study 1 but included an additional cue,
tone of voice, such that a speaker said “where” in either a serious, genuine manner, or
a playful, pedagogical manner. Integrating the speaker’s context, eye gaze, and
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semantics of the utterance and tone of voice thus implied that the speaker was
sincerely looking for the hidden object that she could not see when she asked “where”
in a serious, genuine manner but that she wanted the child to pick the object she was
looking at when she asked “where” in a playful, pedagogical way (just as adults do
when reading picture books to children). We found that while monolingual and
bilingual 4-year-old children were equally likely to select the hidden object when
asked “where” in a serious, genuine manner, bilingual children were more likely than
monolingual children to select the mutually visible object when asked “where” in a
playful, pedagogical manner.
Study 4 examined how children make use of communicative cues such as hand
gestures with co-occurring speech cues (order-of-mention) to infer a target object in
face of an ambiguous pronoun. Children were shown pairs of animal characters
pictures (same gender) and they heard stories about the two characters doing some
reciprocal action. The experimenter either provided a co-referential localizing gesture
that was consistent with the first- or second-mentioned character, or none at all while
telling the stories. Children were asked to determine which character an ambiguous
(gender) pronoun referred to. Children, monolingual and bilingual alike, chose the
first-mentioned character more when the gesture was targeted at the first-mentioned
character than when it was not. However, bilingual children showed more adult-like
pattern of responses than monolingual children, including a burgeoning order-of-
mention bias and differentiated responses when order-of-mention bias conflicted with
gesture. In sum, bilingual children indicated a greater level of sensitivity to the
experimenter’s gesture than monolingual children.
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Study 5 examined how the experience of a communication breakdown (of a
bilingual nature) may increase children’s sensitivity to communicative cues. This is
achieved by introducing a communication breakdown that is typically present in a
bilingual environment (language mixing) to induce a state of uncertainty as to what the
speaker is talking about, and then introducing a situation where there is a need to make
use of the speaker’s cues (e.g. pointing and eye gaze) to locate a hidden object. The
same children were followed up about one month later to examine whether such
benefit (if any) would extend to performance of task after a period of delay. In sum,
children who had experienced a communicative challenge (experimental condition)
immediately performed better across almost all test trial-types than children in the
control condition who heard just English. However, this effect was transient, in the
sense that about one month later, this overall heightened sensitivity was no longer
distinguishing the two groups of children’s performance. Rather, a certain level of
consolidation seemed to have taken place, such that performance of children in the
control condition have improved over time, but children’s (experimental condition)
heightened level of sensitivity to a speaker’s cues held up in the most challenging
trials. This pattern of results was similar to our earlier study where we found that
bilingual children performed better than monolingual children in a similar game only
in the most challenging trials.
Self-Generated Efforts to Maintain Communicative Effectiveness
These studies support the argument that there are circumstances where
attunement to social cues to understand a speaker’s intent is heightened due to the
116
demands of the social environment one is in. More specifically, growing up in an
environment where a child hears people speaking more than one language presents a
unique yet sustained challenge of understanding ambiguous referents in a social
interaction and intensifies the need to avoid communication breakdown. This
heightened need to communicate successfully may elicit self-generated efforts to
monitor the communicative requirements of the socio-linguistic context. For example,
bilingual children may experience a greater chance of a communication breakdown
due to language choice compared to monolingual children. Bilingual children may
have to constantly monitor the dynamic communicative situation to determine what
language a given speaker is using and what the speaker is referring to, in part to deal
with these challenges. The argument is that by being sensitive to the communicative
context, cues about the speaker’s behaviors, and a speaker’s state of knowledge and
dispositions, children can substantially narrow down the plausible referential intents of
a speaker and consequently be successful in their communicative efforts. Hence, such
self-generated efforts to maintain communicative effectiveness may result in a greater
awareness in bilingual children to the social, pragmatic and communicative contexts
surrounding language use, such as a heightened sensitivity to communicative cues that
indicate the speaker’s referential intent.
This emphasis on the role that self-generated efforts play in promoting
development differs from the more usual emphasis on the role of experience and input.
The influence of input on children’s cognitive and linguistic development in general is
well documented. For example, there is a substantial relationship between the
quantity, lexical richness, and sentence complexity of mothers’ speech to their
117
children and the vocabulary and syntactic growth and linguistic processing in young
children (e.g. Hart & Risley, 1995; Hoff, 2003; ; Hurtado, Marchman & Fernald,
2008; Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991; Huttenlocher, Vasilyeva,
Cymerman, & Levine, 2002; Pan, Rowe, Singer, & Snow, 2005). In addition, children
whose parents more frequently use and explain mental state terms in conversations
with them develop an understanding of theory of mind at an earlier age (e.g. Garner,
Jones, Gaddy, & Rennie, 1997; Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002; Wellman, 1990;
Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Thus, there is little doubt that input can be a
critical factor in understanding others and developing language skills.
I would like to emphasize that experience also fosters development in another
critical way: skills gained via self-generated attempts to cope with challenges that
children regularly face. Take for example, the bilingual advantage in inhibitory
control that was discussed earlier in this paper. The proposed mechanism is that in
order to use the appropriate language in the right context, bilingual children often have
to, of their own accord, suppress one language in order to use the other. The regular
practice of suppressing interference from one language while communicating in
another yields considerable prowess in executive functioning. These advances in
inhibitory control skills are gained largely due to bilingual children’s own efforts to
communicate in the appropriate language.
Similarly, I propose that the advantages found in bilingual children’s use of
referential gestures is a result not of differences in input per se, but of their self-
generated attempts to communicate successfully. For example in Study 5, the amount
of referential gesture provided to children with or without experience of
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communication failure was the same, but children with experience of communication
failure of a bilingual nature became more attuned to the speaker’s gestures than
children with no such experience. Hence, it may be considered that the amount of
input, for example a speaker’s use of pointing, eye gaze, or other gestures, may not
substantially differ between monolinguals and bilinguals, but rather, bilingual children
become more vigilant in trying to avoid communicative breakdown and thereby have
more practice in monitoring and assessing a wider range of communicative cues.
However, there are no studies to date that provide insights about the nonverbal aspects
of communication in a bilingual environment, that is, whether bilingual children were
indeed exposed to a greater amount of input or were given more scaffolding in using
communicative cues compared to monolingual children. Further studies would be
needed to examine this argument in greater detail.
One interesting question that remains is in what way such a need to avoid
communicative breakdown is unique to bilinguals. For example, monolingual
children frequently experiences communication breakdown when learning new labels
to novel objects. Are there specific types of communication breakdown that are more
crucial than others in this process, such as those specific to the bilingual experience
(e.g. mixing foreign words in an English utterance) versus those that are general in a
communication process (e.g. ambiguous reference, “Can you give that to me?”)
Similarly, there is a need to determine the nature of such communication breakdown,
such as whether this experience is person-specific or situation-specific. For example,
does the increased sensitivity apply only to the person with whom a child has prior
communication breakdown, or does the experience of communication breakdown
119
induce an overall heightened sensitivity to any subsequent speaker? Further studies
will provide important insights to these questions.
In sum, my research has found that bilingual children are more effective than
monolingual children in integrating various communicative cues to understand a
speaker’s communicative intent. Such successful use of communicative cues could be
due to bilingual children’s more sophisticated understanding of the use of multiple
cues in a socio-communicative context rather than a simple reliance on a single cue
regardless. Most importantly, children who experienced communicative challenges of
a bilingual nature were found to be better than children who had no such prior
experience to use a speaker’s communicative cues to determine the speaker’s
communicative intent. Such sensitivity continued to persist in the more challenging
task even one month after the initial experience of communicative challenges.
Hence, my research suggests that experience with communication failure (such
as those of a bilingual nature) may increase children’s efforts to monitor and utilize
various communicative cues in order to avoid further communication failure. This
may heighten children’s sensitivity to nonverbal communicative cues, foster a more
sophisticated interpretation of the communicative context, and contribute overall to the
development of communicative competence in children.
120
CHAPTER 4
REFERENCES
Appendices
Appendix A: Language Questionnaire
Please kindly answer the following questions (and return it by either dropping it into the marked envelope provided near the entrance of the classroom or handing it to the Head Teacher) Name of child: _____________________ Birthdate:_____________________ Birthplace: ________________________ Class: __________________ Name of parent: ____________________ Date of completion:______________ (1) How many languages (both past and current) are your child learned/exposed to?
________________ (2) For EACH language as per (1), write down the approximate age that your child
was first exposed to it and the context in which your child was exposed to.
Language Age first exposed
With whom or where? (You can check more than one)
1.
! ! ! ! ! ! Mother Father Grandparents Caregiver School Others:__
2.
! ! ! ! ! ! Mother Father Grandparents Caregiver School Others:__
3.
! ! ! ! ! ! Mother Father Grandparents Caregiver School Others:__
121
(3) For a typical week, estimate how much time (%) your child hears and/or speaks a language (if more than one language, they should add up to 100%)
Language 1. ______ % 2. ______ % 3. ______ % Total = 100 %
(4) What languages do you, your spouse and/or caretaker speak, and how proficient?
Language(s) Proficiency (please circle for each lang) Not Moderately Very Proficient Proficient Proficient
Mother: 1.
2.
3.
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
Father: 1.
2.
3.
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
Caretaker: 1.
2.
3.
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
1 2 3 4 5
122
Appendix B: List of Sentences Used in Study 4
1) Ms Ducky is going out with Ms Owl. Ms Ducky/Owl wants the bag. (practice)
2) Mr Teddy is playing cowboy with Mr Penguin. Mr Teddy/Penguin wants the
rope. (practice)
3) Ms Kitty is at school with Ms Chicky. She wants the book.
4) Mr Bear is playing outside with Mr Piggy. He wants the ball.
5) Ms Reindeer is going to a birthday party with Ms Bear. She wants the present.
6) Mr Racoon is having lunch with Mr Doggy. He wants the picnic basket.
7) Mr Froggy is getting ready for school with Mr Panda. He wants the sweater.
8) Ms Bunny is going to the beach with Ms Bear. She wants the sunglasses.
9) Mr Doggy is getting ready to bed with Mr Froggy. He wants the pajamas.
10) Ms Mousie is getting dressed with Ms Reindeer. She wants the hat.
11) Ms Kitty is taking a bath with Ms Bunny. She wants the towel.
12) Mr Panda is cleaning the house with Mr Piggy. He wants the broom.
13) Ms Chicky is taking a picture with Ms Mousie. She wants the camera.
14) Mr Racoon is playing music with Mr Bear. He wants the guitar.
123
Appendix C: List of Sentences Used in Study 5
Control Condition:
1) Can you bring me the big piece of cardboard please? 2) Can you help me put this cardboard in this slot please? 3) Can you bring me the two silver & blue boxes please? 4) Can you help me put this box on the table please? Experimental Condition:
1) Can you bring me the "oh-ki-na a-tsu-ga-mi" please? (ohkina = big) (atsugami = cardboard) 2) Can you help me put "ko-no a-tsu-ga-mi” in this ‘ha-ko" please? (kono = this) (hako = box) 3) Can you bring me "fu-ta-tsu-no ha-ko" please? (futatsu = two) 4) Can you help me put "ko-no ha-ko" on the "tsu-ku-e" please? (tsukue = table)
124
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