Barr, R. & Subiaul, F. .
Georgetown University, The George Washington University
Monolinguals and bilinguals face different constraints on word learning (Kandhadai, Hall, & Werker 2017), which may alter visuospatial processing demands. Morales, Calvo, and Bialystok, (2013) reported that 5-year-old bilinguals performed better than monolinguals on a difficult Corsi Block visuospatial task, whereas Verhagen, Mulder, and Leseman (2017) reported no difference between monolingual and bilingual 3-year-olds on a 6-box visuospatial task where performance was near ceiling. We reanalyzed data collected for 142 (36 bilingual) 2.5- to 4.5-year-olds (M =41 months) on 2 difficult imitation tasks: Spatial- and Item-Based. In the spatial task the child imitated a sequence based on spatial location (e.g. top, bottom, left); In the item task, the child imitated a sequence based on item identity (e.g. apple boy cat). Our measure was the number of correct responses divided by the total number of trials to complete the sequence. There was no difference between monolingual (M=1.73, SD=.95) and bilingual children (M=1.71, SD=.93) on item imitation but bilinguals performed better on the spatial imitation task (M=2.03, SD=.89) than monolinguals (M=1.55, SD=.90). Our methods confirm that task difficulty parameters are crucial when examining possible differences between monolingual and bilingual learners. We are testing whether this effect extends to individual learning.