Learning-to-Learn: A Comparison of Monolingual and Bilingual Instruction

Abstract Research shows that bilingual children often experience delays in language and academic development compared to their monolingual peers. To address this challenge, we evaluated the role of increased exposure in the acquisition of monolingual and bilingual tacts. Increased exposure was provided in the form of four within-subject replications across different sets of stimuli. The participants were three preschool children with autism spectrum disorder. Initially, participants demonstrated more efficient learning in the monolingual condition compared to the bilingual condition; however, these differences decreased across successive within-subject replications. Common errors included cross-language responses, with slightly more errors for Spanish than English targets, as well as generalized error patterns from previously learned repertoires to novel targets. Overall, our results highlight a learning-to-learn phenomenon and suggest that the initial challenges in bilingual tact acquisition may be temporary.