Elena Nicoladis
Elena Nicoladis has published several recent articles on gesture and language development in bilingual and monolingual children. Her SSHRC and NSERC funded research is challenging current views about the symbolic nature of gestures and about how bilinguals represent information in their languages. For example, her finding that children assume gestures mean actions rather than objects might explain why children have difficulty interpreting number gestures and it challenges the view that children treat gestures and words as equally symbolic.
Elena Nicoladis’ vibrant research program addresses many questions about gesture and language in monolingual and bilingual children. For example, one line of research (conducted in collaboration with Paula Marentette) explores gesture use in children and adults from various language backgrounds. One of their recent studies showed that children assume gestures mean actions rather than objects. The movement inherent in gestures could bias children to think that gestures mean action. These results might help explain a study from 2009, showing that children had difficulty interpreting number gestures relative to number words: because number gestures are static, they might violate children’s bias to associate gestures with action so they don’t help children figure out quantities. This finding also challenges some researchers’ assumptions that hearing children treat gestures and words as equally symbolic.
A second line of research investigates language learning in monolingual and bilingual children. One recent publication showed that when bilingual children make speech errors in misordering words in one language, some of them show evidence of activation of their other language. This finding contradicts previous work suggesting that bilinguals might misorder words because they had represented their languages incorrectly. Another recent study showed that French-English and Chinese-English bilingual children tend to learn how to mark verbs for past tense in English a bit later than monolingual children do, suggesting that exposure to and practice with English is an essential part of learning how to mark verbs in a language. Surprisingly, the bilinguals were not as far behind the monolinguals as might be expected if practice with English were the most important reason that children learn past tense markers. In other words, using any language (even Chinese that does not mark verbs for tense) seemed to help bilingual children learn English. Additional questions addressed by her research include:
- How do children learn their first words?
- How do children learn their first gestures? (Why we don’t need to introduce a whole new kind of learning to explain human infants’ acquisition of “pick me up”)
- How do children organize their concepts as they get older and how are these affected by bilingualism?
- How do bilingual children’s and adults’ use of gestures compare to monolinguals?
- how/when do children decide to attend to word order in their language?
Sample Publications
Marentette, P. & Nicoladis, E. (2011). Preschoolers’ interpretations of gesture: Label or action associate? Cognition, 121, 386-399.
Nicoladis, E., Song, J., & Marentette, P. (Published online August 2011). Do young bilinguals acquire past tense morphology like monolinguals, only later? Evidence from French-English and Chinese-English bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics. DOI: 10.1017/S0142716411000439
Nicoladis, E., Pika, S., & Marentette, P. (2010). Are number gestures easier than number words for preschoolers? Cognitive Development, 25, 247-261.
Nicoladis, E., Rose, A., & Foursha-Stevenson, C. (2009). Talking for speaking and cross-linguistic transfer in preschool bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 13, 345-370.
Nicoladis, E., Pika, S., & Marentette, P. (2009). Do French-English bilingual children gesture more than monolingual children? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 38, 573-585.
Yan, S. & Nicoladis, E. (2009). Finding le mot juste: Differences between bilingual and monolingual children’s lexical access in comprehension and production. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 323-335.
Current Position
University of Alberta, Associate Professor [Professor as of July 1, 2012]
Degrees
McGill University (MA, PhD)
University of California, Berkeley (BA: Psychology and French literature)
Collaborators
Paula Marentette (University of Alberta, Augustana Campus)
Cassandra Foursha-Stevenson (Mount Royal University)
Andrea Krott (University of Birmingham)
Angélique Laurent (University of Alberta, Campus St. Jean)
Simone Pika (Max Planck Institute of Ornithology)
Maria Graziano (Lund University)
More Information
Elena Nicoladis' website