Lending a helping hand for English-Chinese bilingual children’s idiom comprehension and retention: implications for early childhood educators
| Autor: | Raquel Plotka, Xiao-lei Wang |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
Early childhood education
05 social sciences Literal and figurative language 050105 experimental psychology Linguistics Education Linguistic competence Comprehension Nonverbal communication Reading comprehension Developmental and Educational Psychology 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Early childhood Psychology Neuroscience of multilingualism 050104 developmental & child psychology |
| Zdroj: | Early Years. 38:298-315 |
| ISSN: | 1472-4421 0957-5146 |
| DOI: | 10.1080/09575146.2016.1258693 |
| Popis: | Idiom comprehension and production reflect a child’s language competence. Research suggests that there is a positive relationship between children’s reading comprehension skills and their idiom understanding. This study examines whether adult verbal scaffolding, in conjunction with the deliberate use of iconic gestures, can facilitate young bilingual children’s comprehension and retention of idiomatic expressions in their different languages. Twenty-three five-year-old English-Chinese bilingual children learned novel idioms across two experimental conditions. In Experiment 1, a native Chinese-speaking adult and a native English-speaking adult, respectively, taught children a set of Chinese and English idioms via speech only. In Experiment 2, the same adults, respectively, taught a different set of Chinese and English idioms via speech–gesture combinations. The results suggest that children could comprehend more idioms in both languages after being taught via the speech–gesture modality than the sp... |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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