Locale o globale? La comprensione inferenziale in soggetti bilingui

“As the world becomes smaller, through immigration, travel, and communication networks, bilingualism becomes more common and, hence, understanding the cognitive and educational implications of being bilingual becomes more important” (Durgunoğlu, 1997, p.272). While important research at the word level has advanced in last years and contributed to our theoretical understanding of how the bilingual’s two lexicons are organized in memory, less is known about how bilinguals process text at the discourse level. The aim of this study, based on a text-comprehension task where local and global coherence was tested, is to examine differences in referential and situational skills between bilinguals and non bilinguals. Findings suggest that different processes are at work during comprehension. The results are discussed within a mental model approach to comprehension in which readers attempt to maintain both local and global coherence beyond linguistic competence.