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Abstract

Monolingual children follow pointing over labeling when these are in conflict in object selection tasks. Specifically, when a speaker labels one object, but points at another object, monolinguals select the object pointed at. Here, we ask whether (i) bilingual children show the same behavior as monolinguals and (ii) relative language proficiency affects bilinguals’ conflict resolution. 35 monolingual and 32 bilingual two- to four-year-olds performed an experiment involving a conflict between pointing and labeling. The bilinguals were tested in Dutch and in English. The bilinguals had a stronger preference for pointing over labeling and selected both objects less often than the monolinguals. Point following was stronger in the bilinguals’ weaker language than in their stronger language. These results support earlier findings on bilinguals’ increased sensitivity to socio-pragmatic cues and weaker reliance on mutual exclusivity, and show that previously acquired language knowledge affects how children weigh socio-pragmatic and lexical cues.

4. Discussion

This study replicates a previous experiment on children’ resolution of referential conflicts (Grassmann & Tomasello, 2010) which showed that German monolingual children overwhelmingly followed pointing over labeling when both cues were pitted against each other in a disambiguation experiment. In our study, Dutch monolingual children and bilingual children were tested. The aim of our study was twofold: (i) compare monolingual and bilingual children’s preferences for pointing versus labeling and (ii)investigate possible effects of relative language proficiency on the bilingual children’s disambiguation behavior. For the monolingual children, our results closely resembled those of Grassmann and Tomasello (2010): Dutch monolingual children aged two to four years largely followed pointing over labeling, and did so more often when presented with a novel label than with a familiar label. The main finding of the study is that the reference resolution patterns of the bilingual children differed from those of the monolingual children in two ways. First, the bilinguals followed pointing over labeling significantly more often overall. Second, the bilingual children hardly ever selected both objects in response to the experimenter’s seemingly contradictory reference, while such responses did sometimes occur in the monolingual children. A further finding was the bilingual children showed an effect of relative language proficiency such that they followed pointing more frequently in their weaker language than in their stronger language. Furthermore, we found some tentative evidence that children with higher vocabulary scores in a given language followed pointing less often in that language. However, only the correlation between English vocabulary scores and children’s responses in the novel label condition of the English experiment reached significance, so this finding needs to be interpreted with caution.