Bilingual word learning: Against the stereotype

Abstract

The development of bilingualism in children and how they learn words has been a long-studied subject. Past research suggests that monolinguals and bilinguals have a different but distinct trajectory of word learning. The current study compared word learning differences in monolingual, intermittent bilingual, and bilingual children between the age of 17-46 months. Forty-five participants were assigned to three groups based upon their exposure to an additional language and completed choice tasks in a fast-mapping task, a novel noun generalization task, a direct novel name and retention task, and a known word comprehension task. Participants' accuracy and reaction time in making choices were measured across trials and averaged. One-way analysis of variance was carried for each task, and the results indicated no significant difference in accuracy or reaction was noted across the groups for each of these tasks, with the exception of the known word comprehension task. The bilingual participants had lower accuracy than the other two groups for the known word comprehension task. Overall, the results suggest that there was no significant difference in reaction time for all groups- meaning that participants were able to fast-map, retain new novel words, identify known objects, and generalize novel objects at a similar rate to each other. All three groups exhibited a shape bias on novel noun generalization tasks as well.