INVESTIGATING HOW 4.5-YEAR-OLD MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL CHILDREN UTILIZE THEIR CONTEXT TO INFER CONCEPTUAL MEANING

The potential effect of bilingualism in children has been widely debated. The study investigates the potential relationship between bilingualism and the conceptual organization of 4.5-year-old children, specifically the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift. To explore this, children are exposed to two types of lists, associative and taxonomic, in a free word association task and a novel label extension task. Bilingual children are expected to perform in a more mature pattern than monolingual children. I argue these results may highlight the accelerated shift from syntagmatic to paradigmatic organization