Bridging ears and eyes when learning spoken words: On the effects of bilingual experience at 30 months

Abstract

Children raised in a bilingual household from birth (simultaneous bilinguals) are growing in number. Dual language experience represents a unique challenge, as children have to contend with two languages, while receiving minimal exposure and extent variation for each individual input (Bijeljac-Babic, 2018). One source of information that alleviates perceptual uncertainties is seeing the visible orofacial movements accompanying speech. During social interactions, seeing talking faces provides information that is highly redundant and complementary to the auditory signal (Miller

In the ear of the viewer: Toward an auditory dominance in early word learning

“…Moreover, the aforementionned study was on adults and may not be relevant to the earliest moment of development. It also involved bilinguals, and may not apply to monolinguals, as bilingualism is known to enhance attentiveness to visible speech in children (Havy & Zesiger, 2021) and adults (Soto-Faraco et al, 2007). Future studies will have to control for cross-linguistic influences to determine whether infants' developmental trajectory between 14 and 18 months is independent of their language background.…”

“…The role of visible speech has been well documented in the literature. From shortly after birth to adulthood, studies have found that attending to the visible articulatory information assists speech perception in normal and adverse listening conditions (Brancazio, 2004; Buchwald et al, 2009; Fort et al, 2010, 2012; Havy et al, 2017; Havy & Zesiger, 2017, 2021; Samuel & Lieblich, 2014; Teinonen et al, 2008; Ter Schure et al, 2016). Yet, little is known about how and how early in development visible speech begins to shape the sensory format of the nascent lexicon.…”

“…But missing from this view is a mechanistic account of how visible speech is incorporated in lexical representations as they become established. Building on a cross-modal word learning design, Havy and colleagues have started to address this issue (Havy et al, 2017; Havy & Zesiger, 2017, 2021). In this work, the authors traced two individual mechanisms.…”

“…The purpose of the present study is to seek more direct evidence that visible speech is encoded during auditory word learning. Previous work has suggested that children primarily rely on the auditory modality until 30 months, and at 18 months only incorporate visible speech through cross-modal translation of the auditory input (Havy et al, 2017; Havy & Zesiger, 2017, 2021). In the present study, we extend this investigation earlier.…”

“…As they learn new lexical mappings in the auditory modality, do 14-month-old infants bridge their auditory and visual senses to create a cross-modal representation of the words? To test this, we employed the same word learning design as the one used in Havy et al (2017) and Havy and Zesiger (2017, 2021). In this task, infants were administered four learning trials with two novel word–object pairings in the auditory modality.…”