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Part of
Cross-linguistic Influence in Bilingualism: In honor of Aafke Hulk
Edited by Elma Blom, Leonie Cornips and Jeannette Schaeffer
[Studies in Bilingualism 52] 2017
► pp. 49–74

Semantic prediction in monolingual and bilingual children

| Radboud University Nijmegen
| Koç University
| Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey | Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands

One of the mechanisms responsible for the fast recognition of spoken language is prediction. This study examined whether 4–5 year old monolingual children differ from bilingual children in predicting the upcoming noun on the basis of the lexical semantics of the verb. In an eye-tracking task, we presented visual displays with two objects (e.g. cake, tree) while presenting semantically constraining (e.g. The boy eats the big cake) or neutral sentences (e.g. The boy sees the big cake). Results showed that both groups are able to predict but that 4-year-old bilinguals are faster than their monolingual peers. Moreover, sentence prediction ability in bilinguals is associated with performance on the forward digit recall task. These results extend views on bilingual sentence processing.

Keywords: bilingualism, eye-tracking, prediction, working memory
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Material
    • Norming task
    • Linguistic and cognitive tasks
    • Procedure
  • Results
    • Linguistic and cognitive data
    • Eye-tracking data
    • Prediction ability
    • Time course of prediction ability
    • Individual differences
  • Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.52.04bro
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