During the autumn holidays, we collected our research at the Science Museum NEMO in Amsterdam! 30 children visiting NEMO also participated in our research, called “Do you get what I mean?”. This project looks at whether multilingual children take into account what another person can and cannot see during a conversation more than monolingual children. The results of previous research showed that multilingual children pay more attention to this. We want to investigate whether this is really the case and whether it applies to all multilingual children or only to certain groups of multilingual children, for example children whose parents both speak a different language.
In the study, children sat opposite a cupboard with compartments containing toys and were given instructions such as “Put the small car under the spoon”. Some toys were visible to the child, but not to the researcher. The question was whether children took this into account: did they move only the toys the researcher could see or also the toys the researcher could not see?
Our data collection is not yet complete: we want to test a total of 40 monolingual children and 80 multilingual children. In the next newsletter, we hope to tell you more about the results of this study!
