Bilingual children weigh speaker's referential cues and word-learning heuristics differently in different language contexts when interpreting a speaker's intent.

ABSTRACT: Past research has investigated how children use different sources of information such as social cues and word-learning heuristics to infer referential intents. The present research explored how children weigh and use some of these cues to make referential inferences. Specifically, we examined how switching between languages known (familiar) or unknown (unfamiliar) to a child would influence his or her choice of cue to interpret a novel label in a challenging disambiguation task, where a pointing cue was pitted against the mutual exclusivity (ME) principle. Forty-eight 3-and 4-years-old English-Mandarin bilingual children listened to a story told either in English only (No-Switch), English and Mandarin (Familiar-Switch), English and Japanese (Unfamiliar-Switch), or English and English-sound

SUBMITTER: Hung WY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4461834 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature