Stimulus Discrimination Learning and Transposition in Bilingual Children

Abstract

A two-stimulus size-discrimination and transposition task was administered to 120 native Spanish-speaking, bilingual first, second and third grade students from bilingual instruction and English-only instruction classrooms. Half of the Ss learned the task and verbalized stimulus selection responses in Spanish, half in English. Results suggest that these bilingual students learned the initial discrimination task more rapidly when they verbalized in Spanish. English-only classroom students tended to transpose more when they had verbalized selection responses in Spanish, bilingual classroom students transposed more when they had verbalized in English. No significant differences in rate of discrimination task learning were observed between the two instructional programs.