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Differences in word learning in children: Bilingualism or linguistic experience?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2020

Maria Borragan ,
Angela de Bruin ,
Viktoria Havas ,
Ruth de Diego-Balaguer ,
Mila Dimitrova Vulchanova ,
Valentin Vulchanov  and
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia Open the ORCID record for Jon Andoni Duñabeitia [Opens in a new window]
Maria Borragan
Affiliation:
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain
Angela de Bruin
Affiliation:
University of York, York, UK
Viktoria Havas
Affiliation:
Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Trondheim, Norway
Ruth de Diego-Balaguer
Affiliation:
ICREA, Barcelona, Spain; University of Barcelona; Barcelona, Spain; and L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Spain
Mila Dimitrova Vulchanova
Affiliation:
Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Trondheim, Norway
Valentin Vulchanov
Affiliation:
Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Trondheim, Norway
Jon Andoni Duñabeitia*
Affiliation:
Universidad Nebrija, Madrid, Spain; and Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: jdunabeitia@nebrija.es
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Abstract

The current study examines how monolingual children and bilingual children with languages that are orthotactically similar and dissimilar learn novel words depending on their characteristics. We contrasted word learning for words that violate or respect the orthotactic legality of bilinguals’ languages investigating the impact of the similarity between those two languages. In Experiment 1, three groups of children around the age of 12 were tested: monolinguals, Spanish–Basque bilinguals (orthotactically dissimilar languages), and Spanish–Catalan bilinguals (orthotactically similar languages). After an initial word-learning phase, they were tested in a recognition task. While Spanish monolinguals and Spanish–Catalan bilingual children recognized illegal words worse than legal words, Spanish–Basque bilingual children showed equal performance in learning illegal and legal patterns. In Experiment 2, a replication study was conducted with two new groups of Spanish–Basque children (one group with high Basque proficiency and one group with a lower proficiency) and results indicated that the effects were not driven by the proficiency in the second language, as a similar performance on legal and illegal patterns was observed in both groups. These findings suggest that word learning is not affected by bilingualism as such, but rather depends on the specific language combinations spoken by the bilinguals.

Keywords

bilingual word processinglinguistic experienceorthotactic regularitiesword learning
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 42 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue: Individual Differences in Bilingualism , March 2021 , pp. 345 - 366
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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