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.
