Evidence of Early Language Discrimination Abilities in Infants From Bilingual Environments

Abstract

Previous research data indicate that soon after birth, infants from monolingual families can discriminate utterances drawn from languages that differ prosodically, but discrimination between rhythmically similar languages, such as English and Dutch, has not yet been established by 2 months of age. In the case of bilinguals, the question of how early they can distinguish between the languages of exposure remains unanswered. The goal of this study was to analyze language discrimination capacities in 4‐month‐old bilingual infants simultaneously exposed to 2 Romance languages belonging to the same rhythmic category, Spanish and Catalan. Using a familiarization‐preference procedure, 2 groups of bilingual‐to‐be infants showed a capacity to discriminate between these 2 familial languages. Moreover, when compared with 2 groups of infants from monolingual environments, the size of the observed effects was the same. These results can be taken as initial evidence of an early capacity to distinguish languages in simultaneous bilingual exposure, thus challenging the hypothesis that language discrimination capacities are delayed in bilinguals.

Discriminating languages by speech-reading

“…Although Spanish and Catalan belong to the same general rhythmic class (i.e., both are syllable-based languages-see , there are some other possible cues that could have an effect on prosody. For instance, the distribution and frequency of vowels in the language have been associated with discrimination abilities in young prelinguistic children using acoustic stimuli (see Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001, for the specific case of Spanish-Catalan discrimination). Supporting the potentially important role of these types of suprasegmental cues in the present results, recent studies reveal that there are reliable visual cues to rhythm, especially in head movements, when observers watch someone speak (Munhall et al, 2004;Vatikiotis-Bateson et al, 1996;Yehia et al, 2002).…”

Biased generalization of newly learned phonological alternations by 12-month-old infants

“…Forty 12-month-olds (26 males, mean age = 370 days, age range = 349-407 days) participated. All had more than 85% input in English based on a parental language questionnaire (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001;Sundara & Scutellaro, 2011). Eleven additional infants were tested but excluded due to crying (n=9), experimenter error (n=1), or equipment problems (n=1).…”

A Review of Studies on Bilingual Children’s Word Awareness Development

“…The reasons why bilinguals can encode unfamiliar sounds more efficiently are as follows: One is that bilingual phonological system is more inclusive, which prepares bilinguals to decode unfamiliar sounds. The other is that early exposure to two different phonological systems can delay the beginning of the specific sound system adjustment (Bosch, Van Hell, & Mahn, 1997). Generally in a year or so, young children's phonological ability begins to language specified.…”