The Exposure Advantage: Early Exposure to a Multilingual Environment Promotes Effective Communication.

ABSTRACT: Early language exposure is essential to developing a formal language system, but may not be sufficient for communicating effectively. To understand a speaker's intention, one must take the speaker's perspective. Multilingual exposure may promote effective communication by enhancing perspective taking. We tested children on a task that required perspective taking to interpret a speaker's intended meaning. Monolingual children failed to interpret the speaker's meaning dramatically more often than both bilingual children and children who were exposed to a multilingual environment but were not bilingual themselves. Children who were merely exposed to a second language performed as well as bilingual children, despite having lower executive-function scores. Thus, the communicative advantages dem

SUBMITTER: Fan SP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4791950 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature