Language background differences in processing instruction

Abstract

The present study investigates how language background differences (LBD) interact with the effects of processing instruction (PI). Specifically, this study examines how fast and accurately monolingual and bilingual subjects receiving either PI or a control, output-oriented treatment, process numeral classifiers ba and tai in Mandarin Chinese. Participants’ onset of correct response during training was measured by trials-to-criterion. Improvements over time were assessed using a sentence-level interpretation task at pre-test and post-test. Results indicate similar learning rates and accuracy on the post-test for all participants trained with PI. In the control condition, however, the bilinguals displayed better accuracy than their monolingual peers on the post-test, even though the onset of their correct responses during training did not differ significantly. Because the monolingual and bilingual-PI groups each outperformed the two control groups on both assessment measures, these results suggest that PI allowed participants to compensate for the effects of their LBD.