A Tachistoscopic Study of Monolingual and Bilingual Children

Abstract

A tachistoscopic study of 10 monolingual and 10 bilingual children, was taken up to investigate the effect of hemispheric processing in Kannada and English language using concrete nouns from both the languages. A comparison of monolingual and bilingual performance on Kannada revealed a better performance by monolingual over bilinguals. The bilinguals however, did not show a significant difference in performance on three language lists viz. Kannada-Kannada, Kannada-English and English- English. On both intergroup and intergroup performance, of monolinguals and bilinguals, a consistent left visual field superiority was found. Possible contributing factors are discussed in relation to the performance of the two groups.