Bilingualism
Are bilinguals better at picking up new words implicitly?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Bilingual students learned which made-up words went with which pictures more accurately than monolinguals, even though nobody told them the words were names, but both groups struggled to tell apart words differing only in vowel height.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Between-group comparison (monolingual vs bilingual) on a cross-situational word-learning task, with within-subject manipulation of test pair type (non-minimal, consonant minimal, vowel minimal pairs)
- N
- N=31 · 16 Australian English monolinguals (Sydney) and 15 Singaporean English-Mandarin simultaneous bilinguals (Singapore)
- Population
- University students in Sydney and Singapore, all native English speakers
- Outcome
- Accuracy and reaction time in a two-alternative forced-choice test of learned word-object pairings
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Key findings
Both groups learned the word-object pairings above chance, and bilinguals were more accurate overall. Everyone did better on non-minimal pairs than on minimal pairs, and better on consonant than vowel minimal pairs. Words differing only in vowel height (like DEET vs DIT) were at chance for both groups. Bilinguals were slower than monolinguals to respond on vowel minimal pairs, which the authors link to Mandarin speakers relying more on vowels or to a vowel missing from their languages.
Methodology
Sixteen Australian English monolinguals and 15 Singaporean English-Mandarin bilinguals who learned both languages from early childhood watched 36 short trials, each showing two unfamiliar objects while two nonsense words (such as BON, DON, DEET, DIT) were spoken in an American accent, without saying which word named which object. They were then tested on which object each word referred to. Test pairs differed in several sounds, in just the first consonant, or in just the vowel.
Limitations
The groups were tiny (16 and 15) and came from different countries, universities and cultures, so bilingualism is confounded with nationality, education system and other unmeasured differences such as socioeconomic status, which the authors acknowledge they did not measure. The study cannot say why bilinguals did better, since working memory and executive function were not tested. Only one bilingual pairing and one test accent were used, and publication bias in bilingual-advantage research, which the authors themselves discuss, means a single small positive result should be treated cautiously.
How this study connects
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