How does childhood bilingualism and bi-dialectalism affect the interpretation and processing of pragmatic meanings?

Abstract

Recent research has reported superior socio-communicative skills in bilingual children. We examined the hypothesis of a bilingual pragmatic advantage by testing bilingual, bi-dialectal and monolingual children on the comprehension and processing of various pragmatic meanings: relevance, scalar, contrastive, manner implicatures, novel metaphors and irony. Pragmatic responses were slower than literal responses to control items. Furthermore, children were least accurate with metaphors and irony. Metaphors and irony were also the most difficult to process; for these meanings, pragmatic responses were slower than literal responses to the same critical items. Finally, pragmatic performance positively correlated with working memory. Despite this variation, we found no bilingual or bi-dialectal advantage over monolinguals in pragmatic responses or speed of pragmatic processing. This was also true despite bilinguals’ and bi-dialectals’ lower vocabularies as measured by formal tests. We conclude that bilingual children exhibit monolingual-like pragmatic interpretation, despite their often-reported weaker language knowledge in the target language.

Irony Comprehension in Bidialectal Speakers

“…Finally, in Antoniou et al. (2020), the pragmatics test included two items on irony. The researchers reported that ironic items were among the most demanding to interpret for all children.…”

On the Variability of Scalar Implicature Computation: Evidence from L2 English Adults

“…Bilingual children's precocious pragmatic development is possibly due to their enhanced executive control skills, or maybe bilingual children develop "heightened pragmatic skills as a compensation of their weaker knowledge of core language" [57]. However, Siegal et al's results, which suggest that bilinguals make more pragmatic interpretations than monolinguals as a function of their enhanced executive functioning control, does not seem to be in line with the results reported by Antoniou and Katsos [36]. Similar to Siegal et al [56], Antoniou and Katsos used a large battery of pragmatic tests that probe into the knowledge of different types of conversational implicature.…”

“…Their study compared the performance of three groups of participants whose years of age range between 6 and 9: (i) monolinguals, (ii) bilectals, and (iii) and multilinguals. Antoniou and Katsos [36] found no statistical difference between bilingual, bilectal, and multilingual children's understanding skills. Multingual and bilectal children exhibited monolingual-like understanding of implicatures; and therefore, there was no multilingual-exclusive pragmatic advantage revealed, consistent with a recent study exploring the pragmatic abilities of Slovenian monolingual and Slovenian-Italian bilingual 10-year-olds [50].…”

“…However, participants' proficiency in the language of testing as well as years of age were critical predictors of implicature understanding. Antoniou and Katsos [36] concluded that implicature understanding is a "pragmatic-communicative skill that largely depends on children's language abilities. "…”

“…Current investigations on scalar implicature computation increasingly place emphasis on the underlying causes of variation in responding to under-informative sentences, viz, while some people tend to be consistently pragmatic in their interpretations of under-informative sentences, others tend to be consistently logical and often equivocal [17,[31][32][33][34]. It is undeniable that there are numerous subtle factors that could induce this variability, including the item choice (i.e., universal vs. categorical sentences [2,32]), number of fillers [35], language and linguistic skills [36,37], scale structure [29,38,39], but some propositions suggest that this variation is possibly triggered by a decision that is made at a meta-linguistic level: whether to accept and reject a statement is dependent upon personality and pedantry factors [26,40]. For instance, in their seminal work, Nieuwland et al [41] found that the pragmatically-skilled participants (as indexed by a low score on the Communication subscale in the autism spectrum quotient [42]) tended to perform automatic processing of scalar inferences more than their less skilled peers as indexed by the N400 event-related potential (ERP).…”