What is the difference between bilingual and monolingual

Monolingual children had an average speaking proficiency of 8. For comprehension, the bilinguals had an average proficiency of 9. To ensure that the sentences were indeed perceived as native-accented and foreign-accented, 20 undergraduate students French or English dominant rated the level of accentedness for all the sentences in their dominant language.

That is, English-dominant students rated the English sentences whereas French-dominant students rated the French sentences. They used a Likert scale ranging from 1 not accented to 7 strongly accented.

Photographs of 16 smiling adults half male, half female of European heritage were used as visual stimuli. As none of the children had previous experience with Haitian Creole speakers, they were unfamiliar with their typical ethnic characteristics.

Thus, speaker ethnicity in the visual stimuli could be kept constant and dissociated from the true ethnicity of the speakers who recorded the auditory stimuli. Images were selected from the NimStim set of facial expressions Tottenham et al.

Images were paired together such that each pair was of the same gender, and was as similar as possible in other features e. The procedure was modeled after Kinzler et al. Participants were tested individually in a quiet room either in the laboratory or at their school. All participants were tested in their dominant language by a female bilingual experimenter, who had grown up hearing and speaking both languages and had a native accent in both languages. All experimental trials were presented in the participant's dominant language.

The experimenter told children that they were going to see pictures of people and hear their voices, and that they would need to pick the person that they would most like to be friends with. On each trial, the experimenter displayed a pair of faces on a laptop screen. The experimenter then pointed at once face and drew attention to it verbally, e. This procedure was then repeated for the other face.

Each pair of speakers uttered identical sentences, however one speaker had a native accent while the other had a foreign accent. A different sentence was used on each trial.

The side of presentation of the native versus accented speaker and the order in which the two speakers were introduced was counterbalanced across trials for each child as well as across children, and the particular pairing of the face and the voice native vs. Children were then asked to point to the person that they would most like to be friends with. Each child completed 8 trials.

The number of times out of 8 trials that children chose the native-accented speaker was recorded and the proportion of native-accented speaker choices was used as the main dependent variable in the subsequent statistical analyses.

To test whether the speakers' accent influenced monolingual and bilingual children's social preferences, we conducted two-tailed one-sample t -tests comparing the proportion of native-accented speaker choices against chance 0.

A scatterplot of individual results is presented in Figure 2 , showing that very few children preferred the foreign-accented speaker over the native-accented speaker. As is apparent in the figure, there was no evidence that children's preferences varied as a function of their language dominance, or the language of testing. Figure 1. Children's preference for native-accented speakers as a function of language group. Error bars show the standard error of the mean. Figure 2. Children's preference for the native-accented speaker as a function of language exposure.

The present study compared 5—6 year-old English and French monolinguals' and English-French bilinguals' preferences for native-accented versus foreign-accented speakers of their dominant language. We presented monolingual and bilingual children a series of trials in which they heard two speakers, one who spoke their dominant language with a native accent and another who spoke it with an unfamiliar Haitian Creole accent, and asked them which person they wanted to be friends with.

Consistent with previous findings Kinzler et al. This result replicates and extends previous research that reported that older monolingual children exposed to a range of languages and accents are also biased toward native-accent speakers, particularly at older ages [9—10; Cohen and Haun , see also Lev-Ari and Keysar ; for related work showing adults' preference for native accents].

Our findings suggest that bilingual children's greater exposure to different languages and accents does not necessarily lead to generalized social flexibility.

In the current study, bilinguals were not more tolerant of foreign-accented speech than monolinguals. As we only tested 5-year-old children, future studies should test younger and older children using the same paradigm, to examine whether differences between monolinguals and bilinguals would be apparent at other ages.

Given the differences between our predictions and our results, the question remains as to what drives children's language-based preferences. One possibility is that, at least at younger ages, familiarity is a strong driver of preferences. That is, children prefer native speakers over foreign and foreign-accented speakers because the native-accented speech is more familiar. If this is the case, then bilingual children might show attenuated preferences to certain languages and accents because they have been exposed to these more than monolinguals.

If so, English-French bilinguals might react similarly to a native speaker of French and an English-accented speaker of French. This comparison should be tested in future work. Consistent with our findings, this explanation predicts that when a language variety is unfamiliar to both monolinguals and bilinguals, both groups will prefer the unaccented speaker.

A second explanation is related to children's emerging ability to make social evaluations. A large literature on selective trust suggests that children make judgments of who to learn from and who to interact with Mills, For example, children prefer to learn from those who have been accurate in the past Harris and Corriveau, , and 5-year-olds but not younger children value past accuracy over familiarity Corriveau and Harris, Children may interpret a foreign accent as a cue that the speaker has incomplete or unreliable knowledge.

However, a second heuristic proposed to underlie children's selective trust is group membership Harris and Corriveau, Children prefer to learn from those who are part of their linguistic in-group Kinzler et al. Both monolinguals and bilinguals in the current study might have detected the accented speaker as being an out-group member, and thus displayed a social preference for their in-group member. The current data cannot tease apart these possibilities.

However, future research with bilingual children could provide an important test of these two theoretical positions. For children exposed to a single language, membership in a linguistic group and familiarity with a language are confounded: monolingual children are typically only familiar with the language of their in-group.

However, the question remains, is there no way to develop the proficiency of someone who grew up bilingual? Therefore, one need to know which areas are activated in a monolingual's brain. Monolinguals as a group were LH[ left hemisphere ] dominant overall when collapsed across paradigms and tasks.

However, monolinguals showed the bilateral involvement on tachistoscopic viewing paradigms and bilateral involvement on tasks with visual demands. Handbook of Bilingualism. A tachistoscope is "an apparatus for use in exposing visual stimuli, as pictures, letters, or words for an extremely brief period" dictionary. This is comparable to the brain activity of early bilinguals when using a language.

The bilinguals, regardless of language acquisition age, "showed LH [ left hemisphere ] dominance for tasks with auditory demands and bilateral involvement for tasks with visual and global demands" Handbook of Bilingualism.

That is to say, they more often use both hemispheres than monolinguals. Therefore, in another study with a face discrimination task, monolinguals did better than bilinguals, because the right hemisphere showed less activity in early bilinguals than in monolinguals Handbook of Bilingualism. It is hypothesized that "the neuronal space available for nonlinguistic functions in bilinguals is 'crowded' by the demand for additional cortical space needed to process the two languages" Handbook of Bilingualism.

Consequently, there is not enough space for other functions besides language. Moreover, learning multiple languages at a young age "may affect not only the organization of language [in the brain], but also that of nonlinguistic functions" Handbook of Bilingualism. In a study, a "homogenous group of 12 high-proficiency bilinguals", who learned the second language after the age of five years was tested.

They had to do various phonological and semantic word generation tasks in the first and the second language. Notably, the research results differ from the previously mentioned outcomes that resulted in a clear distinction between a later learned language and the native language, because there was "no evidence that a language learned later in life may be differently represented from the native language" Handbook of Bilingualism.

In another phonological study, a "homogenous group of early and high-proficiency bilinguals" showed "more extensive brain activity" to subjects less known by the participant "even when [the participant was] highly proficient for that language" Handbook of Bilingualism.

They "hypothesized that the brain activations were related to exposure and practice" Handbook of Bilingualism. In other studies, it is mentioned that the "age of acquisition is a major factor in the organization of L2 [ second language ] processing," but also, that there is a possibility "that language proficiency, rather than age of acquisition, may be the crucial factor in determining the neural organization of language processing in bilinguals" Handbook of Bilingualism.

That is to say, there is a chance that language proficiency developed after the critical period can possibly become the level of a native speaker like an early bilingual. In , in a cued word generation task, there were no differences found in the brain activity of early bilinguals and late bilinguals; that means as long as "the degree of proficiency in bilinguals is very high, a common neural network is activated independent of age of acquisition" Handbook of Bilingualism.

Lastly, a study consisting of two high-proficiency groups with the task to listen to stories in their first language and their second language was made Handbook of Bilingualism. The first group consisted of late bilinguals and the second group of early bilinguals Handbook of Bilingualism.

The results showed that "the patterns of brain activity" were overlapping Handbook of Bilingualism. These facts underline the prediction that language proficiency is the crucial factor.

Garbin, G. Bridging language and attention: Brain basis of the impact of bilingualism on cognitive control. NeuroImage, 53 4 , — Krizman, J. Subcortical encoding of sound is enhanced in bilinguals and relates to executive function advantages. Mechelli, A. Neurolinguistics: Structural plasticity in the bilingual brain. Nature, , Fabbro, F.

Pathological switching between languages after frontal lesions in a bilingual patient. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 68 5 , — Mohades, S. DTI reveals structural differences in white matter tracts between bilingual and monolingual children. Brain Research, , 72— Luk, G. Lifelong bilingualism maintains white matter integrity in older adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 31 46 , — Kaushanskaya, M.

The bilingual advantage in novel word learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 16 4 , — Bartolotti, J. Language learning and control in monolinguals and bilinguals. Cognitive Science, 36 , — Kovacs, A.

Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Craik, F. Delaying the onset of Alzheimer disease: Bilingualism as a form of cognitive reserve. Neurology, 75 19 , — Schroeder, S. A bilingual advantage for episodic memory in older adults. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 24 5 , — Schweizer, T. Cortex, 48 8 , — Linck, J.

Cross-language lexical processes and inhibitory control. Mental Lexicon, 3 3 , — Diaz, R. Towards an explanatory model of the interaction between bilingualism and cognitive development. Reading skills for college students offer some advice and practice which may help these students achieve their goals. Research Questions The present thesis will set out to pursue the following research questions: RQ1.

Is there any difference between Iranian monolingual and simultaneous bilingual learners who learn reading comprehension?

Participants The initial research participants of this study totally were simultaneous bilingual Arabic — Persian and monolingual students Persian of grade three high school learners. From all, 60 participants were simultaneous bilingual that speak and apply both Arabic and Persian while 50 participants were monolingual that communicate with all just through Persian language. These students were selected from four male and female high schools of Bandar-e Mahshahr city, Khuzestan province, Iran.

After conducting the Quick Placement Test, 30 simultaneous bilingual including 15 male and 15 female and 30 Monolingual EFL Learners also including 15 male and 15 female were selected in four groups. Instrumentation Different testing instruments were utilized in the process of the development of the present investigation. The purpose of this test was to place students reliably into appropriate levels.

The validity of pre — test was content validity; the test was given to two experts and was confirmed by them. While reliability for pre — test was not necessary, because the QOPT that was taken before pre — test was a standard test and rejected the necessity of reliability.

The last instrument is post-test that after the completion of eight session instruction of reading comprehension will be carried out to compare the probable differences between four groups of bilingual and EFL monolingual learners and also between male and female in reading comprehension field. Validity for post — test i. Since the items of the post — test was those which applied for the pre — test, but the pre — test was modified for prevention of reminding the items and the validity once again met for the content validity.

The pre and post — tests were piloted on a sample of the learners who were at the same level with the participants. After the completion of this process, the researcher identified four different high schools in four different areas of Bandar-e Mahshahr. The reason behind selecting four schools instead of two was the population density and the race of people living in the city. In some parts of Bandar-e Mahshahr, there are people living near each other and they are simultaneous bilingual students.

On the other hand, in some other parts of city like industrial areas, the majority of people were bilingual and finding simultaneous bilingual students was difficult. It was so that selecting two high schools one girl high school and one boy high school for doing this research was actually impossible.

Finally, four high schools two girl high schools and two boy high schools were identified and the researcher randomly selected male and female high school students. From all, 55 students were male and also 55 learners were female while 60 students were simultaneous bilingual Arabic — Persian and 50 participants were monolingual Persian. Based on another division, from 55 male students 30 learners were simultaneous bilingual and 25 of them were monolingual while from 55 female students, also 30 learners were simultaneous bilingual and 25 students were monolingual.

This test was consist of 60 multiple choice items in four papers and it takes 40 minutes to answer by male student while maximum 35 minutes were sufficient for the last girl to complete her paper. They included 30 simultaneous bilingual 15 female and 15 male and 30 monolingual 15 female and 15 male and divided into four groups of 15 students.

The test has been done by four groups of monolingual male learners, simultaneous bilingual male learners, monolingual female learners, and simultaneous bilingual female learners and also the papers were corrected scores were cleared and put aside. Treatment as the third and one of the most important steps of the research procedure after the completion of pre — test was started. The treatment for this investigation was eight sessions and during eight weeks all 60 participants were taught different texts and reading comprehension strategies based on Audio — Lingual Method.

During eight sessions, the researcher aimed to make students apply the already learned strategies, they were also required to mention the strategies that they had used to their answers. The chosen texts did not need to be difficult, since the goal is to use strategies and see the results of the given strategies on their reading comprehension. Due to the shortage of the time, these texts were also quite short so that students could finish them in the given time.

During the time that the students were practicing their reading strategies while doing their reading comprehension tasks. The final phase of present research was conducting a post—test based on what 60 simultaneous bilingual and monolingual participants have been taught during eight sessions. Finally, the papers were corrected and the scores were put in the side of pre—test scores for analyzing and identifying the probable differences between male and female or between simultaneous bilingual and monolingual learners.

Data Analysis To achieve the goal, the collected data were analyzed using different statistical procedures. Descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviations were estimated to describe and summarize the data. The obtained scores of four groups were processed through the application of the statistical software SPSS. The researcher used One-way ANOVA method in order to analyze whether four groups of learners are different and to identify if there is any difference between the groups.

Results The data were gathered after the treatment were analyzed to find out if in learning reading comprehension is there any specific differences between simultaneous bilingual and monolingual Iranian EFL learners. It should be noted that the data were analyzed through SPSS, version Descriptive statistics is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. This table shows that the mean for pre-test of female monolingual is While the mean for the pre-test of male monolingual and male simultaneous bilingual students are Table 2 shows that Observed F for pre — test is. This means that all 60 students of four groups of female monolinguals, female simultaneous bilinguals, male monolinguals, and male simultaneous bilinguals were homogeneous from the beginning. The data were obtained from the performance of the students on the post-test after eight sessions on reading comprehension.

They were analyzed descriptively in terms of the mean and standard deviation of the four groups in the post-test which are presented in Table 3. Table 2. In this table, the mean for female monolingual learners in post — test is Also respectively the mean of post — test for monolingual male and simultaneous bilingual high school students is Table 4 indicates that the Observed F 9. Post-hoc Scheffe test shows the actual differences between the four groups in the Table 5.

Table 4. The difference between female monolingual students and male simultaneous bilingual learners is significant because mean difference between this two groups is 5. Discussion The first question asks: Is there any difference between Iranian monolingual and simultaneous bilingual learners who learn reading comprehension?

The meaningful difference between the two groups performance could be due to a number of reasons. Firstly, it could be due to the fact that Arab — bilingualism may not have any direct effect on better comprehending of English texts.