2012), it is highly probable that any effects found in monolingual populations cannot be readily extended to bilinguals (Faroqi-Shah, Kevas & Li 2021). Similarly, given how bilingualism affects the mind and brain from early infancy (e.g., bilingual infants and adults have shown inhibitory control advantage see Kroll et al. It is an open question to what extent the results found in adults can be extended to children.
Still, the majority of studies on the impact of word properties on word knowledge or speed of word processing were run on monolingual adults. Understanding whether, and if, how exactly bilingual children differ from their monolingual peers in word knowledge and processing is critical for developing accurate models of childhood bilingualism. Our goal was to examine whether bilingual and monolingual children are equally sensitive to the word properties and if not, which aspects of word knowledge are more vulnerable in bilinguals compared to monolinguals. The present study focuses on processing rather than learning of words and examines how these properties impact the word knowledge (measured by accuracy in picture naming and picture recognition tasks) and the speed of word processing (measured by response times in the same tasks) in bilingual and monolingual children 4–7 years old. 2011), or its frequency in linguistic input (Groot & Keijzer 2000). Some words are easier to learn than others, and the easiness or difficulty of processing a word largely depends on its properties, such as the age at which the word is typically learned (age of acquisition, AoA Carroll & White 1973a), its ability to evoke a mental image in the speaker’s mind (imageability McDonough et al. The results suggest a new area of interest for further studies: the question of whether bilinguals and monolinguals show different sensitivity to psycholinguistic factors, and if so, does that sensitivity change with age or language exposure?Īt the age of 5, children from various language backgrounds are more likely to know the word for a ball than they are to know the word for a nutcracker. Also, the increase in response times for low-imageable and low-frequent words was particularly salient in bilingual children.
Crucially, bilingual children were more sensitive to word characteristics than their monolingual peers: Bilingual children’s accuracy was particularly low for words of high AoA (in the picture recognition task) and for words of low frequency (in the picture naming task).
Word AoA, imageability, and frequency independently affected the accuracy and response times in both picture naming and picture recognition tasks. We used Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks to test 45 monolingual children (aged 4 to 7 years) and 45 migrant bilingual children in their L1 (Polish). Here, we compared the impact of AoA, imageability, and frequency on accuracy and response times in picture naming and picture recognition tasks in monolingual and bilingual children. However, a joint impact of these properties has not been so far assessed in bilingual children. Understanding how different properties of words contribute to the ease of processing by bilingual children is a critical step for establishing models of childhood bilingualism. Word knowledge and the speed of word processing in monolingual children and adults are influenced by word properties, such as the age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, and frequency.