Word comprehension and multilingualism among toddlers: A study using touch screens in daycares

摘要

Most previous research on young infants' spoken word comprehension has focused on monolinguals. These results may not generalize to non-monolingual populations because lexical processing may be more intricate for infants exposed to more than one language. Do toddlers learning multiple languages recognize words similarly to their monolingual peers? Answering this question will require extensive efforts, to which we contribute word comprehension data collected through a procedure aiming to be both precise and ecological. French-learning toddlers (N = 38; age range 1;11-3;4) were tested in their daycare, using a French-spoken prompt-to-picture matching task implemented on a child-friendly touch screen. Our results document some differences in accuracy, but not response time or number of trials completed, among toddlers differing in the number of languages they routinely hear. Additionally, these data suggest that it is feasible to collect good quality data from multiple children tested at once in daycares, opening the path to larger-scale studies. Future research could disentangle the many factors that are often empirically confounded with monolingual versus bilingual/multilingual status.