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Article published In:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 30:1 (2023) ► pp.31–58

Monolingual and bilingual children’s performance learning words from ostensive teaching

ORCID logo | University of Oxford | University of Cambridge
ORCID logo | University of Cambridge

Children who grow up exposed to more than one language face a range of challenges and developmental environments which differ from those of monolinguals. Recently, studies have suggested that this may lead to differences in the development of pragmatic skills and sensitivity to socio-pragmatic cues. We investigate whether bilingually exposed children are able to make further use of these cues in an ostensive teaching setting for word learning in a sample of 110 children aged 4 to 6 years old and find evidence that bilingual children do perform significantly better in ostensive teaching settings when asked to use pragmatic cues to derive the meaning of a novel word. We discuss implications for theories of pragmatics and bilingual development.

Keywords: pragmatic development, bilingualism, word learning, ostension, inference
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Aims, research questions and hypotheses
  • 3.Experiment
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Tasks
      • 3.2.1Receptive vocabulary task
      • 3.2.2Ostensive teaching of subordinate category
        • 3.2.2.1Stimuli
        • 3.2.2.2Procedure
        • 3.2.2.3Coding of responses
      • 3.2.3Ostensive teaching of action word
        • 3.2.3.1Stimuli
        • 3.2.3.2Procedure
        • 3.2.3.3Coding of responses
        • 3.2.3.4Data analyses
    • 3.3Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion and limitations
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 9 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.22018.lor
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