12 research outputs found
A bilingual advantage in 54-month-olds’ use of referential cues in fast mapping
Research has demonstrated a bilingual advantage in how young children use referential
cues such as eye gaze and pointing gesture to locate an object or to categorize objects. This study
investigated the use of referential cues (i.e., eye gaze) in fast mapping in three groups of children
that differed in their language exposure. One hundred and seven 54-month-old children who
were English monolinguals (n=29), English-Mandarin bilinguals (n=48), and English-Mandarin
bilinguals with exposure to a third language (i.e., trilinguals, n=31) were assessed with a wordlearning
task using two types of tests – a referent test and a mutual exclusivity test. During the
task, following the gaze of an adult speaker was needed to be able to indicate the correct referent
of a novel word at test. All three groups of children demonstrated successful word learning in
explicit selection of and implicit looking time toward the target object during testing. However,
bilingual and trilingual children outperformed their monolingual peers in both types of tests
when they were asked to explicitly select the correct objects. These findings suggest positive
effects of bilingualism on children’s use of referential cues in fast mapping