psy 221 literature review

Monolingual vs. Bilingual 1

Language Acquisition of Monolingual vs. Bilingual

Amira Farhana Binti Jaafar

B1001862

Jessica

B1001386

Department of Psychology

PSY 221

Ms. Siew Ju Li


Language Acquisition of Monolingual versus Bilingual

In many parts of the world, including Malaysia, children are increasingly exposed to

multilingual environment. There has been increasing concerns regarding the impact of these

exposures to children’s development. Consequently, there has been a growing interest in the

research area of the language acquisition in children who live in a multiple language

background. Specifically, researchers are keen to study how these children develop

differently from that of their monolingual peers. Aspects of research include syntactic,

semantic, phonological, words and vocabulary acquisition as well as cognitive capacity of

these children.

However, there has been conflicting results yielded from the researches. Some

researchers suggested that the exposure to multiple languages in children do more harm than

good, e.g., language impairments in bilinguals (Salameh, Nettelbladt, Håkansson, &

Gullberg, 2002), less expressive vocabulary acquired (Thordardottir, 2011), slower

production of language under constraint context (Poulin-Dubois, Bialystok, Blaye, Polonia, &

Yott, 2012). On the other hand, there are also researches in favor of those bilinguals, wherein

they have greater flexibility in learning new languages (De Houwer, Bornstein, & De Coster,

2006), higher memory ability (Kormi-Nouri et al., 2008). Despite the two competing

arguments, a group of research suggested equal standing between bilinguals and

monolinguals in language acquisition rate (Bedore, & Pena, 2008), semantic memory (Pena,

Bedore, & Rapazzo, 2003).

In light of these variances in results, current review is keen to evaluate these past

literatures to gain deeper understanding of the research areas, to reconcile the current

controversies in the findings, to identify gaps and to suggest some explanations and

implication of the area being reviewed. Also, this review will elaborate on the different


methods employed by these past studies, the different factors involved in conducting the

research, as well as the different hypotheses and conclusions yielded.

Disadvantages of Bilingual

Studies in the past have been keen to find out the differences between monolinguals

and bilinguals. Researchers have assessed the different way in which both groups learn their

language and acquire vocabulary as well as lexical comprehension. Some studies were keen

to compare the advantages and disadvantages of these two language groups. A mixed finding

of the advantages of monolinguals and bilinguals was found by Torrance, Gowan, Wu, and

Aliotti (1970), which assessed monolingual and bilingual (Chinese-Malayan) children in the

third, fourth, and fifth grade. They assessed for their fluency, flexibility, and elaboration

using Creative Thinking Test. Results were significantly in favor of monolinguals for fluency

and flexibility, while elaboration was significantly higher for bilinguals. Originality did not

have significant result. These ambiguous findings later was delved into deeper by subsequent

researches to verify the advantages and disadvantages of bilinguals and monolinguals.

Considerably, many researchers showed disadvantages of bilinguals. Salameh,

Nettelbladt, Håkansson, and Gullberg (2002) assessed bilinguals’ disadvantages by

comparing bilinguals and monolinguals with language impairment conferred to University

Hospital for 12 months. Results showed that bilinguals were referred as having Language

Impairment (LI) significantly more times than monolinguals and were significantly more

likely to be referred after the age of five. Besides, bilinguals were significantly more likely to

be diagnosed as having a severe LI than monolinguals. Although there is no cause and effect

relationship, the findings gives a link in that bilinguals are more likely to develop severe

language impairment. This study did not provide any explanation of why is that so,

subsequent studies would look into more specific areas of the disadvantages as well as the

explanation of it.


Thordardottir’s (2011) study which sampled 5-year-old children that fall under a

continuum of bilingual exposure (French only, French dominant-English, equal French-

English, English dominant-French, English only) served to showed the effects of level of

exposure in vocabulary acquisition. Results suggested that because of lower exposure of first

language in bilinguals as compared to monolinguals, they have acquired less vocabulary.

However, the implication is that given enough time for bilinguals to be exposed with both

language, their performance then can match that of monolinguals. Besides, bilinguals need

less time to achieve a similar level of receptive vocabulary in monolinguals, though slower

acquisition in expressive vocabulary. Some possibilities to explain these are that children do

not receive meaningful redundant input, have limited capacity to utilize, or bound by the

upper limit of words average that of a 5 years children.

Poulin-Dubois, Bialystok, Blaye, Polonia and Yott (2012) studied on early bilinguals

also in line with that of Thordardottir’s. Their study gained from parental report was that 2-

year-old bilinguals have fewer first language expressive vocabularies than monolinguals.

However, the total vocabulary of both first and second language of bilinguals combined was

similar to that of monolinguals. Besides, they also employed test on laboratory where they

measure reaction time to gain understanding about lexical access speed in early bilinguals.

Three variables were assessed, the frequency (high or low exposure to words), context (none,

high, or low time constraint), English proficiency. Results showed bilinguals’ production is

significantly slower in high constraint context and lowest English proficiency, whereas the

reading or comprehension task was less affected to slowing down. These posit challenge on

previous findings of bilingual disadvantages, to look at differences as due to processes in

employing search strategies for production and comprehension. The study suggested

flexibility as production requires more cognitive demands, the need in finding lexical form to

production is higher than to assessing meaning. It also suggested restriction in which the


process of language expression and understanding can be shared in a natural setting of

language use.

Advantages of Bilingual

As much as arguments on the disadvantages of learning more than one language at

once, De Houwer, Bornstein, and De Coster’s (2006) looked extensively at how the bilingual

(in this case the Dutch-French) infants acquire their lexical comprehension. Their findings

suggested that bilinguals as young as 13 months were able to understand that two words from

different language can mean for one thing. Thus bilinguals tackle the Principle of Contrast

that only one word can mean for one thing. Monolinguals, on the other hand, hold the

principle of contrast because they are exposed with less language diversity. Bilinguals who

receive more variations of language input have the flexibility in employing learning language

strategies. As such, bilinguals acquire more forms of meaning and this implies that more than

one language can be an advantage for bilinguals’ development. However, it should be noted

that De Houwer, Bornstein, and De Coster’s (2006) study was a longitudinal study using

parents’ report as the data of the children’s lexical comprehension. Thus their observation

might not be reliable.

Building on that, Fennell, Byers-Heinlein, and Werker (2007) looked specifically into

a smaller unit of language acquisition, which is the speech-sound. Their study assessed

bilingual infants aged between 14 to 20 months with the use of Switch task which had

worked successfully for infants in Werker et al. (1998, as cited in Fennel et al, 2007). Results

suggested that bilinguals only learn similar phoneme word at the age of 20 months which was

later than monolinguals. The later use of relevant phonemes for vocabulary acquisition was

assumed to be the cause of overload in cognition when learning two languages

simultaneously. Yet, it was seen as adaptive for bilinguals’ vocabulary acquisition.


Kormi-Nouri et al. (2008) showed an advantage of bilinguals in memory ability

compared to monolinguals. Children with 3 different groups (Persian monolingual, Turkish-

Persian bilingual, and Kurdish-Persian bilingual) were assessed on their semantic memory

using letter and category fluency tests. They modified the cognitive demands on these

memory retrieval tasks into four different groups, e.g., the integration of noun and verb,

manipulation of organization in the sentence, and assessing the bilinguals in both of their

languages. This is to ensure a generalization of the memory ability and not only to specific

tasks, but also to verbal and performing task. The memory retrieval used for assessing

episodic memory were recognition task, free-recall or cued recall.

The results showed a significant positive effect of bilinguals on semantic and episodic

memory (Kormi-Nouri et al., 2008). There was a slightly greater performance of episodic

than semantic memory. Different age-groups (9-10 years, 13-14 years, 16-17 years) were also

employed and yielded that older bilinguals tend to do better for both episodic and semantic

memory task. It was then assumed that the longer a person employed two languages, its

advantages will be more pronounced. The employment of different cognitive tasks used in

this study showed that bilinguals performed better on all of these areas. These results

contradict with the findings of Bialystok (2010; Bialystok, Barac, Blaye, and Poulin-Dubois,

2010) which suggested that bilinguals advantages are in specific areas only, e.g., problem-

solving skills. Different methods used for retrieval in this study, retrieval and recall task

suggest that bilinguals perform better regardless of the memory tasks’ complexity.

A study done by Patihis and Oh (2010) served to verify the conflicting past findings

by looking as well into a more specific area of bilingualism/multilingualism advantages.

They assessed monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual children in their ability of sound

perception of novel languages. The participants consist of monolingual, Spanish-English

bilingual, Armenian-English bilingual, and multilingual were to distinguish between Korean


stop consonant. The notion is that bilinguals and multilinguals are exposed to more diverse

language than monolinguals and hence, they have broader phonological perception. Thus

multilinguals should do better than bilinguals which would do better than monolinguals in

distinguishing the sound of a novel language. However, the results only showed that Spanish-

English bilinguals performed significantly worse than Armenian-English bilinguals and

multilinguals, while no other group differences were found. And there was only a low

positive correlation between the number of languages learnt and the speech-sound perception.

The researchers (Patihis & Oh, 2010) suggested that the advantage of bilinguals is not

general but specific to the languages they learnt. Armenian-English bilinguals performed

better than the monolinguals as English does not distinguish the stop consonant requires in

the target language, Korean. Because Armenian has an overlap phonetic similarity to that of

Korean whereas the Spanish does not, Armenian-English bilinguals also did better in making

distinction to Korean stop consonants.

Equal Development between Monolinguals and Bilinguals

Kaushanskaya, Blumenfeld, and Marian’s (2011) study was comparing monolingual

and bilingual adults in their vocabulary performance and its relation with short-term memory.

Besides vigorous results yield by studies supporting advantages and disadvantages of

bilingualism, there is another group of research that has generated results revealing parallel

language acquisition between bilingual and monolingual children (e.g. Patterson, 2000).

According to Bedore and Pena (2008), bilingual children are said to possess equal acquisition

rate as monolingual children. Their review of numerous data acquired from past literatures

concerning language acquisition seemed to indicate that bilingual and monolingual children

learn their first words at about the same age.

Pena, Bedore and Rapazzo (2003) investigated the performance of bilingual children

of Spanish-English background on a series of semantic tasks in relation to their


predominantly English speaking and Spanish speaking counterparts. Fifty-five children with

typically developing language capacity completed six different types of semantic tasks (e.g.

linguistic abilities and organization). They discovered that the scores for semantic knowledge

are similar across language groups. For example, in a category task Spanish-English

participants named similar number of words with their monolingual peers. The assessment

battery's broad examination allowed the children to establish their semantic repertoire to a

full extent which may contribute to the study's findings.

Neutral result was also found in a study on lexical-semantic organization of language.

Sheng, McGregor and Marian (2006) conducted a research using word association task in

order to examine bilingual status of lexical-semantic development relative to monolingual

children. Repeated word association tests were administered to 12 Mandarin-English

bilingual children and 12 English speaking monolinguals aged five to eight years old. During

this task, they were prompted to produce words in separate categories. It was hypothesized

that Mandarin-English children will display bilingual advantage that reflect a higher-level

thinking processes with regard to paradigmatic performance but the findings demonstrated

that there was no difference in performance as both group produced similar proportions of

paradigmatic responses and at comparable response-time.

One of the most frequently researched topics is the vocabulary size of bilingual and

monolingual children. Pearson and colleagues compared lexical development of bilingual and

monolingual children by way of measuring the magnitude of their English and/or Spanish

vocabulary knowledge (Pearson, Fernandez & Oller, 1993). It was found that the spontaneous

vocabulary production in the bilingual toddlers were comparable to norms of their mates

raised in monolingual environment. However, the data used to recruit the participants in the

study was attained from a larger longitudinal study that did not have identical purposes with

her research. Thus inconsistencies might be present in the data collected for all the children


which possibly influenced the outcome of the study. But a similar study carried out by Junker

and Stockman (2002) on German-English bilingual's expressive vocabulary showed

comparable scores to monolingual norms particularly the dominant, more prominent

language. Nevertheless, the performance in the second language of the bilingual children

appeared to be delayed but the researchers attributed this to differences in length of exposure

to the two languages.

Different Aspects of Research as Factors for Results Differences

The vast discrepancy in results yielded by numerous researches in regards to language

acquisition between monolingual and bilingual children begs the question as to why such

differences exist. There are a number of outside, language-related variables stemming from

analysis on present studies can be considered. These interrelated factors of language

complexity and diversity, cultural influences, length of exposure to languages and

socioeconomic status (SES) could point out to research outcome of either positive, negative

or neutral.

First and foremost, it is crucial to realize that languages are dissimilar and complex in

their structure. Language components such as syntax, semantics and phonology vary

depending on the language used in the particular part of the world. To illustrate, adjectives

are applied differently in English and Spanish. To describe something in English, one must

precede the noun with adjective while adjectives in Spanish always come after the noun.

Similarly, phonemes of language are also dissimilar. While people have the ability to hear

and create distinction between phonemes, native speakers of a particular language often

become insensitive to phonological differences that are not part of the language they speak

(Medin, Ross & Markman, 2005). For instance, native speakers of Japanese frequently

replace r for l when they are speaking English. On the other hand, many native speakers of

English are desensitize to the disparity between aspirated p and unaspirated p. Thus studies


intend on comparing phonological sensitivities between two languages in bilingual people

must be aware of such differences.

In a study focusing on the impact of bilingualism on the advancement of phonological

awareness in Chinese bilingual and monolingual primary-schoolers, bilingual Cantonese-

Mandarin speakers were found to progress earlier in relation to onset and rime awareness by

their second grade (Anderson et. al., 2004). Curiously, the edge these bilingual students had

gained over their monolingual Cantonese-speaking peers disappeared by the time they

entered fourth grade. Meanwhile, Cantonese monolinguals were identified to possess

enhanced tone awareness compare to Mandarin-speakers in this study. This was probably due

to Cantonese tone system that is more complex than Mandarin. Hence researchers theorized

that while bilingualism does boosts the development of phonological awareness to a certain

extent, complexity in tone system as witnessed in the Cantonese language is the paramount

factor later in life. The varying syntactic rules, semantics systems and other linguistic

variations present in one language in contrast to another language could be the reason why

similar studies conducted on different regions and languages produced conflicting results.

Furthermore, culture is also a possible contributing factor to varying results in

research as it is closely connected to language. Certain cultures may stress upon particular

syntax or specific context which in turn influences the way vocabulary and cognitive tests are

constructed. Children with English background are familiar making sense if events using the

seven 'wh' questions (who, what, where, which, when or how) but these interrogative words

might not be prevalent in other cultures. Consequently, research that employ culturally-bias

tests will yield deviant results that has the potential to paint an inaccurate picture of the

reality. Future studies could put central attention into designing a valid test for the purpose of

analyzing two languages that is impartial and void from biases as possible (Pena, Bedore &

Rapazzo, 2003).


Another influential variable that plays a role in children's language development is

socioeconomic status (SES). Underprivileged kids who migrated with their parents to another

country with a different language may live in a dual language environment that could

theoretically provide linguistic and cognitive advantage, but a combination of lack of proper

exposure to both languages, parental education and family stability will have cumulative

adverse effects on their language development. Research comparing language acquisition

between bilingual and monolingual children should lay special importance on the amount of

SES equality that exists among the subjects participating in the studies. Research done by

Morton and Harper (2007) on attention control between bilingual and monolingual children is

one example of studies that control for outside factors (see also Sheng, McGregor & Marian,

2006). Their study which was a replication of a past study equated the ethnicity and SES of

their participants and as a result, yielded a contradictory result with the past research's

findings. In contrast to past result, participants in Morton and Harper's study did not show the

presence of bilingual advantage with regards to attention control.

Length of exposure to the languages is another variable that has a strong impact on

children's language development. Past research (e.g. Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer &

Lyons, 1991) has established the relationship between lack of exposure to languages with

among young children with diminutive vocabulary attainment. This low vocabulary level will

in turn propel them to difficulties in other aspects of language comprehension such as reading

and speech complication. Besides that, bilingual children are able to absorb to only half the

input in each language compared to monolingual children who only has to focus on only one

language system. Vagh, Pan and Marcilla-Martinez (2009) performed a study to measure the

growth of English productive vocabulary in English/Spanish bilingual and monolingual

children's rom low-income background. The findings revealed predicted outcome of

monolingual children to have faster advancement but also indicated that bilingual children


who predominantly speaks English at home possess larger productive English vocabularies.

The probable cause for this result is longer length of exposure to English than their bilingual

predominantly Spanish-speaking counterpart.

Implications and Conclusions

Language acquisition of bilingual and monolingual children is a vigorously

researched area of interest in psychology. By studying the development of language and its

differing impact on dual and single language environment, this review serves to gain more

understanding of how they can be applied for a healthy human development, in this case the

language development in infants that are tied with other aspects of growth (memory,

linguistic fluency, etc). The review suggests some limitations in the study as well as identifies

ways to better the future research. Thus future research could explore differing areas that

bilinguals and monolinguals may have advantage of. And because the research in language

development is one that is hard to control, future research could try to control for

confounding variables that might have an impact on the results of the study.


References

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impairment: Current findings and implications for practice. International Journal of

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Bedore, L. M., Peña, E. D., García, M., & Cortez, C. (2005). Conceptual versus monolingual

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Zardkhaneh, S. & Nilsson, L.-G. (2008). The effect of childhood bilingualism on

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Vagh, S., Pan, B., & Mancilla-Martinez, J. (2009). Measuring growth in bilingual and

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doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2009.01350.x


Dear Jessica Lin,

This receipt acknowledges that Turnitin received your paper.Below you will find the receipt information regarding your submission:

Paper ID: 256461649Paper Title: Literature ReviewAssignment Title: Literature ReviewAuthor: Jessica LinE-mail: [email protected]

BODY

Language Acquisition of Monolingual versus Bilingual In many parts of the world, including Malaysia, children areincreasingly exposed to multilingual environment. There has been increasingconcerns regarding the impact of these exposures to children’s development.Consequently, there has been a growing interest in the research area of thelanguage acquisition in children who live in a multiple languagebackground. Specifically, researchers are keen to study how these childrendevelop differently from that of their monolingual peers. Aspects ofresearch include syntactic, semantic, phonological, words and vocabularyacquisition as well as cognitive capacity of these children. However, there has been conflicting results yielded from theresearches. Some researchers suggested that the exposure to multiplelanguages in children do more harm than good, e.g., language impairments inbilinguals (Salameh, Nettelbladt, Håkansson, & Gullberg, 2002), lessexpressive vocabulary acquired (Thordardottir, 2011), slower production oflanguage under constraint context (Poulin-Dubois, Bialystok, Blaye,Polonia, & Yott, 2012). On the other hand, there are also researches infavor of those bilinguals, wherein they have greater flexibility inlearning new languages (De Houwer, Bornstein, & De Coster, 2006), highermemory ability (Kormi-Nouri et al., 2008). Despite the two competingarguments, a group of research suggested equal standing between bilingualsand monolinguals in language acquisition rate (Bedore, & Pena, 2008),semantic memory (Pena, Bedore, & Rapazzo, 2003). In light of these variances in results, current review is keen toevaluate these past literatures to gain deeper understanding of theresearch areas, to reconcile the current controversies in the findings, toidentify gaps and to suggest some explanations and implication of the areabeing reviewed. Also, this review will elaborate on the different methodsemployed by these past studies, the different factors involved inconducting the research, as well as the different hypotheses andconclusions yielded.Disadvantages of Bilingual Studies in the past have been keen to find out the differences betweenmonolinguals and bilinguals. Researchers have assessed the different way inwhich both groups learn their language and acquire vocabulary as well aslexical comprehension. Some studies were keen to compare the advantages anddisadvantages of these two language groups. A mixed finding of theadvantages of monolinguals and bilinguals was found by Torrance, Gowan, Wu,and Aliotti (1970), which assessed monolingual and bilingual (Chinese-Malayan) children in the third, fourth, and fifth grade. They assessed fortheir fluency, flexibility, and elaboration using Creative Thinking Test.

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psy 221 literature review

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