The effects of bilingualism on children’s cross-situational word learning under different variability conditions

The Influence of Bilingualism on Statistical Word Learning: A Registered Report

“…Nevertheless, other studies that explored only 1:1 mappings found a difference between mono-and bilinguals populations (Crespo et al, 2023;Crespo & Kaushanskaya, 2021;Escudero et al, 2016). Interestingly, the three studies found opposite effects.…”

“…A bilingual advantage was found in three studies (Crespo et al, 2023;Escudero et al, 2016;Poepsel & Weiss, 2016), but with different mappings (1:1 vs 1:2), with different populations (unbalanced and balanced bilinguals) and in one case only when multiple word exemplars and speakers were used (Crespo et al, 2023). Additionally, the sample sizes in two studies were very small (around 16 participants per group; Escudero et al, 2016;Poepsel & Weiss, 2016).…”

“…To date, research on Cross-Situational Statistical Learning in bilinguals has been very limited. There is a small number of studies that investigated cross-situational statistical word learning in bilinguals, some using only 1:1 mappings (Crespo et al, 2023;Crespo & Kaushanskaya, 2021;Escudero et al, 2016), with others using multiple mappings (Benitez et al, 2016;Poepsel & Weiss, 2016). Poepsel and Weiss (2016) compared statistical word learning with multiple mappings in English monolinguals and Chinese-English, and English-Spanish unbalanced bilinguals.…”

Effects of environmental diversity on exploration and learning: The case of bilingualism.

“…For instance, because of increased uncertainty in bilingual environments, the use of visual information to learn new words differs in bilingual learners from monolingual learners (Barr et al, 2020; Kalashnikova et al, 2018; Rocha-Hidalgo et al, 2021; Singh et al, 2023). When learning new words, bilingual learners more readily generalize across variable cues (e.g., talkers; exemplars) compared with monolingual learners (Crespo et al, 2023) suggesting that pathways to word learning may differ in bilingual populations on account of variation in generalization.…”

What have we learned from 15 years of research on cross-situational word learning? A focused review

“…Group differences are also observed between monolinguals and bilinguals: Consistent with results from unambiguous word learning paradigms, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in some CSWL studies (Escudero et al, 2016c;Poepsel and Weiss, 2016;Crespo 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1175272 Frontiers in Psychology 06 frontiersin.org et al, 2023) but not all (Benitez et al, 2016;Crespo and Kaushanskaya, 2021), suggesting that differences in language learning history may impact how easily words are acquired statistically. However, the circumstances under which bilinguals outperform monolinguals are currently not well understood, with some suggesting that a bilingual advantage may only exist when more complex word-object mappings are acquired (Poepsel and Weiss, 2016) or when words include multiple sources of phonological variability (Crespo et al, 2023). Given these mixed results, there is a need for more research on how bilingualism may affect statistical word learning.…”