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Communication Skills of Bilingual Children

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Abstract

In order to test whether schooling in a second language affected social skills, 3 groups of schoolchildren from kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 2 were tested in an interpersonal verbal communication task. All children were native English speakers and were tested in English. 1 group attended English schools with English-speaking teachers (Control); 1 attended English schools with French-speaking teachers (Partial Immersion); and 1 group attended French schools with French-speaking teachers (Total Immersion). The groups were comparable in terms of age, socioeconomic level, and verbal and nonverbal IQ. In the task, the children were asked to explain how to play a game to 2 different listeners-1 blindfolded and 1 not blindfolded. There was no significant difference among the groups in terms of how many rules they mentioned to each listener. On the other hand, the 2 immersion groups mentioned more about the materials of the game to the blindfolded than to the sighted listener than did the control group. The results were discussed in terms of differential sensitivity in interpersonal communication, and a possible explanation for differences in the development of such sensitivity was offered.
Additional evidence of newborn’s innate preparedness for language learning comes from
extensive investigation of monolingual children’s perception of segmental features of human
language. It has long been known that adults perceive consonantal contrasts that are phonemic in
their native language categorically – that is to say, acoustic variations within a certain range of
each consonant are all perceived as the same phoneme (e.g. /la/ vs /ra/). It is believed that
categorical perception of the consonantal segments that make up human languages reflects the
hardwiring of the auditory system and its sensitivity to specific acoustic ranges. Precursors to
categorical perception have been demonstrated in pre-verbal monolingual infants. Of particular
relevance to the issue of bilingual acquisition, during the first 6 to 8 months of life, pre-verbal
infants can discriminate most of the phonetic contrasts that all languages make use of (Jusczyk,
1985) whether these contrasts are in the input the infants are exposed to or not. By 10 months,
infants continue to discriminate contrasts that occur in their native language, but no longer
discriminate non-native contrasts .
162 Bilingualism: Beyond Basic Principles
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... Multilingual children (i.e., children with exposure to at least two languages or language varieties) sometimes temporarily lag behind their monolingual peers in terms of their vocabulary and morphosyntactic development in at least one of their languages (Hoff, 2021). Despite this relative delay in language-specific skills, some studies have found that multilingual children outperformed their monolingual peers in their pragmatic ability (e.g., Fan et al., 2015;Genesee et al., 1975;Yow & Markman, 2011a), which we define as the capacity to (i) adjust language or non-verbal communication according to the listener or the social or physical context, or (ii) use information about the speaker or the social and physical context to infer a speaker's communicative intentions, needs or desires (definition adapted from Turkstra et al., 2017). Support for a positive effect of multilingualism on children's pragmatic abilities comes from studies showing that under certain conditions, multilingual children rely more on non-verbal cues (i.e., eye gaze or gestures) during reference resolution than their monolingual peers (Brojde et al., 2012;Groba et al., 2018;Verhagen et al., 2017;Yow, 2015;Yow et al., 2017;Yow & Markman, 2011a; but see Gangopadhyay & Kaushanskaya, 2020. ...
... Support for a positive effect of multilingualism on children's pragmatic abilities comes from studies showing that under certain conditions, multilingual children rely more on non-verbal cues (i.e., eye gaze or gestures) during reference resolution than their monolingual peers (Brojde et al., 2012;Groba et al., 2018;Verhagen et al., 2017;Yow, 2015;Yow et al., 2017;Yow & Markman, 2011a; but see Gangopadhyay & Kaushanskaya, 2020. In addition, multilingual children have been found to more often take a speaker's visual perspective into account (Fan et al., 2015;Genesee et al., 1975;Liberman et al., 2017;Yow & Markman, 2015), repair miscommunications (Wermelinger et al., 2017; but see Comeau et al., 2010), adapt their (non-) verbal communication to the needs of their interlocutor (Gampe et al., 2019), and detect violations of Grice's conversational principles (i.e., be truthful, be relevant, avoid ambiguity, and provide as much information as required; Siegal et al., 2009Siegal et al., , 2010. ...
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Preprint
In this paper, we review recent findings on the development of communicative behaviour of monolingual and bilingual toddlers and preschoolers. We describe how the unique experience of growing up with two (or more) languages affects children’s everyday experiences and the pragmatics of their communicative behaviour. Deriving from this literature, we introduce a novel perspective on children’s development of communicative behaviour (COMmmunicative-Experience, COME), discussing potential mechanisms behind this pragmatic behaviour. It assumes that children experience communicative situations of varying efficiency and that these experiences shape their communicative behaviour: The more experiences children have with non-effective communicative situations, the larger their communicative repertoire becomes and the more flexibly this repertoire can be applied in a given situation. Notably, the COME perspective is not limited to bilingual communicative development but can be applied to a variety of other pragmatic contexts. Therefore, we broaden the discussion by identifying open questions for future research.
Article
Full-text available
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Chapter
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Chapter
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