The exposure advantage: Early exposure to a multilingual environment promotes effective communication.

Here we provide the first evidence that exposure to a multilingual environment early in life promotes the development of effective interpersonal communication. In our experiment children performed a communication task that required taking an interlocutor's perspective to understand her intended meaning. We discovered that monolingual children were at a disadvantage compared to bilingual children, and compared to children who were merely exposed to another language but were not bilingual. Given that exposure to a multilingual environment is the human norm, rather than the exception, we propose that such an environment may facilitate the development of perspective-taking tools that are critical for effective communication. This discovery opens new lines of investigation regarding the social consequences of early multilingual exposure, as well as the potential costs of raising children in an exclusively monolingual social environment.