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.

本研究首次提供实证证据，表明生命早期接触多语言环境，可促进有效人际沟通能力的发展。在本次实验中，儿童需完成一项沟通任务，该任务要求采择对话者的视角以理解其真实意图。研究发现，单语儿童相较于双语儿童，以及相较于仅接触过另一语言但并非双语者的儿童，均处于劣势。鉴于多语言环境接触实为人类的普遍常态而非特例，我们提出，此类环境或可促进对有效沟通至关重要的视角采择能力的发展。本研究发现为早期多语言接触的社会效应，以及仅在单一语言社交环境中养育儿童的潜在代价，开辟了全新的研究方向。