BILINGUALISM ACCENTUATES CHILDREN'S CONVERSATIONAL UNDERSTANDING

Abstract

Although bilingualism is prevalent throughout the world, little is known about the extent to which it influences children's conversational understanding. Our investigation involved children aged 3–6 years exposed to one or more of four major languages: English, German, Italian, and Japanese. In two experiments, we examined the children's ability to identify responses to questions as violations of conversational maxims (to be informative and avoid redundancy, to speak the truth, be relevant, and be polite).

Keywords

Bilingualism, flexibility, children's metalinguistic, Conversational Violations Test