Prediction during spoken language processing in monolingual and multilingual children

Listeners use linguistic cues to anticipate upcoming words, but not all do so to the same extent. While we know that monolingual children use prediction during spoken language processing from a young age and that adult L2 speakers may sometimes be slower, very few studies have focused on bilingual or multilingual children. Moreover, previous research suggests that literacy boosts anticipation in spoken language processing, but this has not been tested yet in bi/multilinguals. We investigated linguistic prediction and its relation to reading and vocabulary skills in 38 eight- to twelve-year-old bilingual and multilingual children who speak different heritage languages and Italian as the majority language, in comparison to 32 age-matched monolingual Italian children. Using a visual world eye tracking method, we tested children’s ability to anticipate nouns based on morphosyntactic cues (gender- and number-marked articles) in Italian. The results show efficient prediction in both groups, although monolinguals were faster than bi/multilinguals. While we found a positive relation between predictive language processing and reading in monolingual children, there were no reliable effects in bilingual and multilingual children. Future work is required to better understand the relation between prediction and literacy in this population.