Activation of referents in the bilingual mind

Abstract

This paper investigates reference production by bilingual and monolingual children. We focus on the degree to which the activation of referents is encoded by different types of referring expressions among bilinguals and monolinguals. The study is based on forty-six story retellings produced in German by twenty-five Greek-German bilingual children and twenty-one monolingual children, respectively. The activation of referents is assessed based on a multi-factorial analysis of cognitive and linguistic factors that are involved in the use of referring expressions. The results show that pronouns produced by bilingual children tend to encode a lower degree of activation of referents and to be underspecific. This may be an effect of reduced processing speed experienced by bilinguals in the mapping of the referent’s activation onto the use of a certain referring expression. More in general, we account for the observed differences between bilinguals and monolinguals in terms of cognitive mechanisms underlying bilingual language production.