Abstract
Children growing up in a dual-language environment have to constantly monitor the dynamic communicative context to determine what the speaker is trying to say and how to respond appropriately. Such self-generated efforts to monitor speakers' communicative needs may heighten children's sensitivity to and allow them to make better use of communicative cues to figure out a speaker's referential intent. Chapter 1 of this paper reviews the current models of bilingualism and literature on the impact of growing up bilingual, including benefits to the cognitive and communicative development of children. Chapter 2 presents a series of studies to examine how the experience of growing up bilingual may foster children's ability to integrate multiple cues to understand a speaker's referential intent, and how the experience of a communication breakdown of a bilingual nature may increase children's sensitivity to communicative cues. Overall, results provide evidence that growing up in a bilingual environment facilitates a more sophisticated understanding of the demands in a communicative context and support the hypothesis that children's self-generated efforts to cope with communicative challenges heighten their sensitivity to a speaker's communicative intent and foster their cognitive and linguistic development.