How does childhood bilingualism and bi-dialectalism affect the interpretation and processing of pragmatic meanings?
How does childhood bilingualism and bi-dialectalism affect the interpretation and processing of pragmatic meanings?
复制标题
DOI：
10.1017/s1366728918001189
复制
发表时间：
2020-01-01
影响因子：
3.6
通讯作者：
Katsos, Napoleon
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Antoniou, Kyriakos;Veenstra, Alma;Katsos, Napoleon
最近的研究表明，双语儿童的社会沟通能力更强。我们通过测试双语儿童、双方言儿童和单语儿童对各种语用意义的理解和加工，包括相关性、标量、对比、方式暗示、新奇隐喻和反讽，来检验双语语用优势的假设。对控制项目的实际反应比字面反应慢。此外，儿童在隐喻和反讽方面最不准确。隐喻和反讽也是最难处理的；对于这些意义，语用反应比字面反应慢。最后，语用表现与工作记忆呈正相关。尽管存在这种差异，但我们发现双语或双方言在语用反应或语用处理速度方面没有单语者的优势。尽管在正式测试中，双语者和双方言者的词汇量较低，但事实也是如此。我们的结论是，双语儿童表现出类似于单语的语用解释，尽管他们在目标语方面的语言知识通常较弱。
Recent research has reported superior socio-communicative skills in bilingual children. We examined the hypothesis of a bilingual pragmatic advantage by testing bilingual, bi-dialectal and monolingual children on the comprehension and processing of various pragmatic meanings: relevance, scalar, contrastive, manner implicatures, novel metaphors and irony. Pragmatic responses were slower than literal responses to control items. Furthermore, children were least accurate with metaphors and irony. Metaphors and irony were also the most difficult to process; for these meanings, pragmatic responses were slower than literal responses to the same critical items. Finally, pragmatic performance positively correlated with working memory. Despite this variation, we found no bilingual or bi-dialectal advantage over monolinguals in pragmatic responses or speed of pragmatic processing. This was also true despite bilinguals' and bi-dialectals' lower vocabularies as measured by formal tests. We conclude that bilingual children exhibit monolingual-like pragmatic interpretation, despite their often-reported weaker language knowledge in the target language.