If the object in focus is familiar to the child and no unknown object is present in the communicative situation, children can search for an alternative referent within the familiar object. This allows monolingual children to indirectly select referents for novel words, in the absence of any explicit hint as to their intended meaning. Since each object should have only one name, monolingual children reject novel labels for known objects and search for alternative referents, a process termed disambiguation. Novel property term learning profits from the assumption that words have mutually exclusive meanings: the Mutual Exclusivity Constraint (MEC). Taken together, our behavioral and neurophysiological findings reveal different paths towards novel property term learning depending on children’s language acquisition context. The data show that, compared to bilinguals, monolinguals reveal higher activation over three brain regions (right frontal, left temporo-parietal, and left prefrontal) that may be involved in exploiting the MEC, building on conflict detection, inhibition, solution of a disjunction, and working memory processes. In the 5-year-olds, we additionally acquired neurophysiological data using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to allow for a first explorative look at potential neuronal underpinnings. Older bilinguals adhered less to the MEC than younger ones, while there was no difference in MEC adherence between the younger and older monolinguals. We found no bilingual-monolingual differences on a behavioral forced-choice task for the 3.5-year-olds, but five-year-old monolinguals adhered more to the MEC than bilinguals did.
Shifting the focus to learning novel property terms (adjectives), the present study compared 3.5- and five-year-old bilingual and monolingual preschoolers’ adherence to the MEC. Studies of novel noun learning show bilingual children rely less on the Mutual Exclusivity Constraint (MEC) for word learning than monolinguals.
0 kommentar(er)
