TY - JOUR
T1 - The influence of bilingualism on statistical word learning
AU - Poepsel, Timothy J.
AU - Weiss, Daniel J.
N1 - Funding Information:
We wish to thank Dr. Taomei Guo, Haoyun Zhang and Siyao Li in the National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning at Beijing Normal University and research assistants in the Comparative Communication Lab at the Pennsylvania State University for help with data collection. We would like to thank Federica Bulgarelli for help with recruiting English–Spanish bilinguals. This research was supported by NIH RO1 Grant HD067250 awarded to DJW and NSF PIRE Grant OISE-0968369 to the Center for Language Science at Penn State University.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2016/7/1
Y1 - 2016/7/1
N2 - Statistical learning is a fundamental component of language acquisition, yet to date, relatively few studies have examined whether these abilities differ in bilinguals. In the present study, we examine this issue by comparing English monolinguals with Chinese-English and English-Spanish bilinguals in a cross-situational statistical learning (CSSL) task. In Experiment 1, we assessed the ability of both monolinguals and bilinguals on a basic CSSL task that contained only one-to-one mappings. In Experiment 2, learners were asked to form both one-to-one and two-to-one mappings, and were tested at three points during familiarization. Overall, monolinguals and bilinguals did not differ in their learning of one-to-one mappings. However, bilinguals more quickly acquired two-to-one mappings, while also exhibiting greater proficiency than monolinguals. We conclude that the fundamental SL mechanism may not be affected by language experience, in accord with previous studies. However, when the input contains greater variability, bilinguals may be more prone to detecting the presence of multiple structures.
AB - Statistical learning is a fundamental component of language acquisition, yet to date, relatively few studies have examined whether these abilities differ in bilinguals. In the present study, we examine this issue by comparing English monolinguals with Chinese-English and English-Spanish bilinguals in a cross-situational statistical learning (CSSL) task. In Experiment 1, we assessed the ability of both monolinguals and bilinguals on a basic CSSL task that contained only one-to-one mappings. In Experiment 2, learners were asked to form both one-to-one and two-to-one mappings, and were tested at three points during familiarization. Overall, monolinguals and bilinguals did not differ in their learning of one-to-one mappings. However, bilinguals more quickly acquired two-to-one mappings, while also exhibiting greater proficiency than monolinguals. We conclude that the fundamental SL mechanism may not be affected by language experience, in accord with previous studies. However, when the input contains greater variability, bilinguals may be more prone to detecting the presence of multiple structures.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.03.001
DO - 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.03.001
M3 - Article
C2 - 27015348
AN - SCOPUS:84961717143
VL - 152
SP - 9
EP - 19
JO - Cognition
JF - Cognition
SN - 0010-0277
ER -