ABSTRACT
In the past three decades, research on the cognitive functioning of multilinguals has seen a steep increase, reflecting an increasing awareness that empirical findings on monolinguals do not apply to a substantial number of people in the world who regularly use more than one language (or dialect) in everyday life (Barac, Bialystok, Castro, & Sanchez, 2014; Bialystok, Craik, Green & Gollan, 2009; Grosjean & Li, 2013; Hammer et al., 2014; Paap, Johnson, & Sawi, 2015). Within this growing body of work, researchers have also investigated the effects of multilingualism on pragmatic competence, broadly defined as the ability to efficiently produce and understand meaning in context (Taguchi, 2009). In this chapter, I review the research on multilingual adults’ and children’s comprehension of non-literal (pragmatically implicated) meanings, an aspect of pragmatic competence that has been relatively well studied in the field of SLA and for which there is now a fair amount of research with multilingual children.
