THE NOVELTY EFFECT IN MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL CHILDREN

Abstract: This study aims to examine memory performance in monolingual and bilingual children, and whether novel information (compared to familiar information) is differently recognized by bilingual children compared to monolingual children, and for boys compared to girls. A sample of 49 pupils from Swedish schools (28 bilingual children and 21 monolingual children; and 24 girls and 25 boys) was used in this study. Both bilinguals and monolingual had to remember or make decisions about different lists of words. They also performed two tasks of semantic memory. After that, they had to rate themselves in their proficiency of Swedish knowledge (writing, reading, speaking and understanding) and knowledge in mother tongue (only for bilinguals). In all memory tasks, no differences were found between bilingual and monolingual groups. Also, novel information was recognized similarly to familiar information and none of the groups was different in this regard.