When language background does not matter: Bilingual children disambiguate and learn novel words just like their monolingual peers

Do mono- and bilingual children differ in the way they learn novel words in ambiguoussettings? Listeners may resolve referential ambiguity by assuming that novel words refer tounknown, rather than known, objects –a response known as the mutual exclusivity effect. Pastresearch suggested a bilingual disadvantage with regard to this disambiguation strategy,perhaps because, across languages, bilinguals’ experience contradicts one-to-one mappings oflabel and referent. Another line of research suggested a bilingual advantage in resolvingreferential ambiguity, based on bilinguals’ advanced pragmatic skills. Here, we examine boththese claims in a preregistered study with comparable samples of mono- and bilingual 3-yearolds(n=74) and adults (n=86). We tested referent disambiguation and retention in two tasks:In the Mutual-Exclusivity task, a speaker used a novel label in presence of a known and anunknown object. In the Pragmatic task, she used another novel label in presence of twounknown objects and participants could infer from the pragmatic context that the speakerreferred to the object that was new in their discourse. Mono- and bilinguals were equallysuccessful in inferring the correct label-referent links in both tasks and retained them after adelay. These findings indicate that children with different language backgrounds can developthe same strategies and pragmatic skills to learn novel words, highlighting the importance oftesting comparable samples of mono- and bilinguals. Children can use their lexical knowledgeand socio-cognitive skills to infer the meanings of novel words, irrespective of whether theyare acquiring one or more languages.