Bilingual versus monolingual infants’ novel word-action mapping before and after first-word production: Influence of developing noun-dominance on perceptual narrowing

Abstract

This experimental study examined bilingual (English and another noun-dominant language) and monolingual (English) preverbal (10.5-month-old) and postverbal (12.5-month-old) infants’ word-action mapping. Sixteen infants in each group were habituated to dynamic video-displays of novel word-action pairings during infant-controlled habituation. They received two words, /wem/ and /bæf/, spoken synchronously with an adult shaking or looming an object, and were tested with switched versus same word-action pairings. Results revealed that for the preverbal bilingual infants, word-action mapping is intensified relative to postverbal bilingual infants. For the postverbal bilingual infants, word-action mapping is attenuated and inversely correlated with noun learning. No such differences were observed in the monolingual infants. These findings illustrate a perceptual protraction prior to word production, and accelerated perceptual narrowing to nouns after word production in bilingual infants learning two noun-dominant languages.

Word learning in monolingual and bilingual children: The influence of speaker eye-gaze

“…The unexpected finding in the current study was that bilingual children showed worse word-learning performance than monolingual children. This finding, although unusual within the broader literature, is consistent with recent evidence suggesting that monolingual children can outperform bilingual children on some word-learning tasks (Gogate & Maganti, 2020; Kalashnikova, Escudero & Kidd, 2018). Besides SES discrepancies between groups – a factor we have taken into account in our analyses – we considered a number of possible explanations for this finding.…”

“…For instance, these prior studies tested 2- and 3-year-olds whereas we tested 4-and 5-year old children. It is possible that effects of bilingualism on sensitivity to eye-gaze during learning may show up more readily in younger children (e.g., Gogate & Maganti, 2020), who have less robust vocabulary and cognitive skills.…”