Bilingual children can respond better to conversation partners
Bilingual children aged three to four have a keener sense of who they are talking to than monolingual children. This is shown by a study from the University of Zurich. The researchers attribute this to the more challenging communication environment in which bilingual children grow up.
When children grow up bilingual, they have to face challenging conversational situations more often and are confronted with the different communication styles of their parents. This could give them a developmental advantage when communicating, as researchers led by Anja Gampe and Stephanie Wermelinger from the University of Zurich report in the journal Child Development report.
According to the study, three- to four-year-old children who grow up bilingually are better able to adapt to their conversation partner. For their study, the researchers had monolingual and bilingual children hide puzzle pieces in different places. Their interaction partners were two hand puppets, a ladybug and a grasshopper, who then searched for the puzzle pieces. The children were allowed to watch the search and give hints, as the University of Zurich wrote in a press release.
However, the ladybug and grasshopper behaved differently. The ladybug gratefully accepted every tip, while the grasshopper preferred to find the puzzle piece on its own and refused any hints.
Monolingual and bilingual children proved to be equally helpful. However, while the monolingual children continued to give the grasshopper explicit verbal clues, the bilingual children often switched to a non-verbal strategy: they took the puzzle piece out of the hiding place inconspicuously and placed it in such a way that the grasshopper could find it himself. The bilingual children were therefore better able to adapt to the needs of their interaction partner.
"Bilingual children react more sensitively to their interlocutors in their communication behavior and show greater flexibility in their choice of means of communication," Gampe was quoted as saying. The researchers see one possible reason for this in the more complex world of communication that bilingual children grow up in. "This could mean that bilingual children understand the communicative signals of others better and have to convey their own concerns more flexibly and sometimes non-verbally," explained Wermelinger. (SDA)
