Introduction Introduction Some notes on 'bilingualism' - UMR 7023

Research questions
The purpose of this investigation
• to establish whether bilinguals demonstrated
superiority in the appreciation of the someall
scalar implicature
• to ascertain whether attention played a
mediating role in any found advantage
Language
group
English
monolingual
Japanese
monolingual
Bilingual
Table (Summary of three
tasks)
N
21
23
20
Age
(mos)
64.2
(8.8)
63.3
(9.0)
65.1
(12.6)
EVMA
67.7
(8.1)
NA
53.5
(15.7)
JVMA
N/A
63.3
(10.1)
59.9
(10.3)
DN/16
11.8
(3.4)
12.2
(4.0)
13.1
(4.3)
CS/10
9.1
(1.5)
8.6
(2.0)
8.6
(2.1)
SI/4
1.43
(1.5)
0.35
(0.8)
2.30
(1.7)
Conclusion
• bilinguals did demonstrate significantly
enhanced performance on the implicature
task. Furthermore this pragmatic advantage
seemed to be attributable to a non-linguistic
consequence of bilingualism.
• bilinguals were not found to display superior
attentional skills and attentional ability did not
appear to relate to implicature appreciation.
• the validity of the attentional assessments
used in this study
Selected references
Papafragou, A., & Musolino, J. (2003). Scalar
implicatures: experiments at the semanticspragmatics
interface. Cognition, 86, 253-282.
Bialystok, E., & Shapero, D. (2005). Ambiguous
benefits: The effects of bilingualism on reversing
ambiguous figures. Developmental Science, 8, 595-
604
Siegal, M., & Surian, L. (2004). Conceptual development
and conversational understanding. Trends in
Cognitive Sciences, 8, 534-538.
Siegal, M., & Surian, L. (in press). Conversational
understanding in young children. In E. Hoff & M.
Shatz (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of language
development. Oxford: Blackwell.
Acknowledgment
We are grateful for the support of the
ESRC, British Academy and Sasakawa
peace foundation for this research.
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