Bilingual children’s understanding of implicit meaning in primary-school

Abstract

In human communication, the comprehension of implicit meaning– i.e. the hidden elements of information necessary to achieve a precise understanding of what is meant in an utterance, is fundamental to the interlocutors' construction of a coherent representation. From a cognitive perspective, the question arises as to whether the cognitive mechanism underlying the processing of implicit meaning is language-specific or language-general. This question is of particular pertinence in the investigation of comprehension mechanisms in a non-native language. The present study addressed this issue by investigating the comprehension of implicit meaning in primary school by forty-five French monolingual and eighty-six French-English bilingual pupils aged 8 and 10. The bilingual children were presented with 24 written sentences (12 in English, 12 in French) containing presuppositions, implicatures or ironies. The monolingual children were presented with the 12 French sentences. The experimental task consisted of answering a question following each trial to ascertain whether the child had recognized and understood the implicit meaning in the target sentence. The mean percentage of correct answers indicated that, despite the bilingual children not being fluent in English, their performance levels in this language were comparable to those observed in their native language, French. Furthermore, and more surprisingly, when tested in French, their native language, bilingual children even outperform monolinguals across both age groups, especially in terms of implicature and irony understanding. Taken together, these data suggest that the cognitive mechanism underlying implicit processing may be language-general. One potential strategy that bilinguals might employ is to base their analysis on contextual cues. This would account for their particularly strong performance in both languages for implicature and irony understanding, i.e., two types of implicit processing relying on contextual analysis. The hypothesis that bilingualism improves the ability to understand implicit meaning independently of language proficiency warrants further investigation.