The experimental literature on bilinguals' pragmatic abilities is rather sparse. The only study that examined adult second language (L2) learners (Slabakova, 2010) found an increase in pragmatic responses in this population compared to monolinguals. The results of studies with early bilingual children are unclear; some find a significant increase in pragmatic responses in early bilingual children (preschoolers) compared to monolinguals (Siegal et al., 2007), while others (Antoniou and Katsos, 2017) testing school-aged children do not. We tested adult French L2 learners of English and Spanish (in both languages) and French monolingual controls in Experiment 1, and Italian-Slovenian early bilingual children (in both languages) and Slovenian monolingual controls in Experiment 2. Our results were similar to those of Antoniou and Katsos (2017) for early bilingual children, but different from those of Siegal et al. (2007). We found no pragmatic bias in adult L2 learners compared to adult monolinguals.
Stateva, P., Andreetta, S., Dupuy, L., Cheylus, A., Déprez, V., van der Henst, J.-B., Jayez, J., Stepanov, A., and Reboul, A., 2019. Pragmatic abilities in bilinguals: The case of scalar implicatures. Linguistic
Approaches to Bilingualsim, vol. 9, iss. 2, pp 1-27,
Link: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/lab.17017.dup