Bilingual and monolingual children process pragmatic cues differently when learning novel adjectives

Abstract

Previous studies have shown bilingually and monolingually developing children to differ in their sensitivity to referential pragmatic deixis in challenging tasks, with bilinguals exhibiting a higher sensitivity. The learning of adjectives is particularly challenging, but has rarely been investigated in bilingual children. In the present study we presented a pragmatic cue supporting the learning of novel adjectives to 32 Spanish-German bilingual and 28 German monolingual 5-year-olds. The children's responses to a descriptive hand gesture highlighting an object's property were measured behaviorally using a forced choice task and neurophysiologically through functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). While no group differences emerged on the behavioral level, fNIRS revealed a higher activation in bilingual than monolingual children in the vicinity of the posterior part of the right superior temporal sulcus (STS). This result supports the prominent role of the STS inprocessing pragmatic gestures and suggests heightened pragmatic sensitivity for bilingual children.

Applications of Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) in Studying Cognitive Development: The Case of Mathematics and Language

“…This finding is further supported by work showing increased activation of bilateral prefrontal cortex during a verbal fluency test in 10- to 11-year-olds (Mücke et al, 2018 ). Bilingual children are supposed to have greater cognitive plasticity, better sensitivity to language functional and structural peculiarities, and more flexibility in their way of thinking than many monolingual children between the ages of 5 and 10 years (Bialystok et al, 2012 ; see also Groba et al, 2018 ). For instance, Jasinska et al ( 2017 ) observed greater activation in left posterior temporal regions—associated with direct sound-to-print (transparent) phonology—and decreased activation in left frontal regions—associated with assembled phonology—in Spanish-English and French-English bilingual children from ages 6 to 10, but not in English monolingual children during an overt word reading task (cf.…”

“…Native language words evoked significantly greater left brain activation than foreign words in the superior and middle temporal gyri, and in inferior parietal regions (angular and supramarginal gyri). Foreign language words elicited activation in the right hemisphere, as primary-school children had only started learning foreign languages and did not know many non-native words (see also Groba et al, 2018 ). Moreover, low-frequency words in both languages led to significant activation in the right supramarginal gyrus, while left-sided activation was detected in the angular gyrus for high-frequency words in the native language, as the lexical meanings of most these words were familiar to children.…”

“…This finding is further corroborated by greater activation in the right superior temporal sulcus in bilingual as compared to monolingual children at the age of 5 years. Groba et al ( 2018 ) observed that in the absence of a behavioral difference, fNIRS results show that Spanish-German bilingual children rely more on the right superior temporal sulcus than German monolingual children during adjective learning.…”

The Container Image Schema as the Conceptual Basis of English Adjectives’ Semantics

“…The distinction between the entity (object) and its properties (qualities) resulted in the formation of a new lexico-grammatical category -the adjective. This consecutiveness of language category formation can be evidenced by the fact that children acquire the names of objects before the names of their qualities (Hiramatsu et al, 2010). Moreover, there exists a certain consecutiveness of adjective acquisition by children (Weicker & Schulz, 2019).…”

Bilingual social cognition: Investigating the relationship between bilingual language experience and mentalizing

“…Conversely, given that mentalizing is a social cognitive process, it may be boosted in the L2 if domain-general social or contextual information can compensate for any language-specific challenges in inference-making (see Ramírez-Esparza, García-Sierra, & Jiang, 2020 for a review of the social benefits of bilingualism). For example, research on bilingual discourse processing has found that L2 complex text comprehension is facilitated by topic cues (e.g., photographs) that convey context on the general theme of the text, particularly for low proficiency L2 readers (Groba, De Houwer, Mehnert, Rossi, & Obrig, 2018;Hammadou, 1991). This work suggests that other, potentially social or contextual, information (e.g., "paralinguistic cues") may compensate for low language proficiency during inference making of complex texts in the L2.…”