Jennifer Markovits
Playa Ancha University, Valparaíso, Valparaíso Region, 2340000, Chile
Elías Ticona
Ministry of Education, Santiago, Metropolitan Region 9160000, Chile
Previous studies have demonstrated that language acquisition is connected to cognitive development. In this line, several works have found that Theory of Mind (ToM) influenced the acquisition of evidentiality across languages. Thus, the previous works trigger the question about the connection between language experience and developing cognitive processes such as ToM. The current investigation is a follow-up study which investigates whether speakers who proficiently use a language with explicit evidential markers at the lexical level would likely exhibit a cognitive edge in developing Theory of Mind abilities compared to those mastering languages lacking such features. Twenty-one bilingual Aymara-Spanish children and nineteen monolingual Spanish children of the same age range and from the same region performed two ToM tasks, showing a similar mean across groups. In addition, inferential statistics were conducted, showing that language experience does not influence the development of ToM abilities. The contribution of the study is twofold. First, from a generativist view, the results support the modularity of language, and, from sociolinguists’ impact, the current study’s data demonstrated that early Aymara-Spanish bilingualism does not affect normal cognitive development.
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Copyright © 2024 Jennifer Markovits, Elías Ticona
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