Is mere exposure enough? The effects of bilingual environments on infant cognitive development

D’Souza, Dean; Brady, Dorothy S.; Haensel, Jennifer X.; D’Souza, Hana

doi:10.1098/rsos.180191

Cited by 52 publications

(97 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(90 reference statements)

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“…However, 7-month-old infants do not produce words, so they do not need to inhibit words in one language in order to produce words in the other 9 . Moreover, when we tried to replicate Kovács and Mehler’s study but with a larger sample, we could not 10 . In our preregistered study 10 , infants from bilingual homes did indeed inhibit the learned response—but so too did infants from monolingual homes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults

D’Souza

Brady

Haensel

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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To adapt to their more varied and unpredictable (language) environments, infants from bilingual homes may gather more information (sample more of their environment) by shifting their visual attention more frequently. However, it is not known whether this early adaptation is age-specific or lasts into adulthood. If the latter, we would expect to observe it in adults who acquired their second language early, not late, in life. Here we show that early bilingual adults are faster at disengaging attention to shift attention, and at noticing changes between visual stimuli, than late bilingual adults. In one experiment, participants were presented with the same two visual stimuli; one changed (almost imperceptibly), the other remained the same. Initially, participants looked at both stimuli equally; eventually, they fixated more on the changing stimulus. This shift in looking occurred in the early but not late bilinguals. It suggests that cognitive processes adapt to early bilingual experiences.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults

D’Souza

Brady

Haensel

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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“…Given its theoretical importance, there have been several attempts to replicate this initial finding. Five teams of researchers, testing infants between 7 and 10 months of age in tasks similar to the original study, did not observe differences between monolinguals and bilinguals (D'Souza et al, 2020;Ibánez-Lillo et al 2010;Kalashnikova, Pejovic, & Carreiras, 2020;Molnar, Pejovic, Yee, & Carreiras, 2014;Tsui & Fennell, 2019). However, in a variant of the paradigm that included more trials (60 rather than 18), Comishen and colleagues (2019) reported a bilingual advantage in one of two studies, after post-hoc exclusion of the first 10 and last 10 trials from analyses.…”

Section: Bilingual Advantage In Infancymentioning

confidence: 69%

“…The origins of such adaptations, moderators, and their impact later in life are interesting open questions. The present contribution was only possible because we employed a fine-grained moment-to-moment analytic approach that captured the richness of looking data and because of D'Souza et al (2020) and Kalashnikova et al's (2020) commitment to Open Science practices. We believe that largescale data collection from diverse bilingual infants, together with analyses that tap into the dynamics of infant learning, have a great potential to contribute to the complex and exciting debate of bilingualism effects in infancy.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, in a visual habituation task, 6-month-old bilinguals showed more efficient visual stimulus encoding and stronger recognition of stimuli than monolinguals (Singh et al, 2014). Bilinguals, tested between age 7 and 9 months, outperformed monolinguals in two of three cognitive flexibility tasks (D'Souza et al, 2020). Enhancements in memory generalization were found in 6 and 18-month-old bilinguals (Brito & Barr, 2012;Brito, Greaves, Leo-Santos, & Fifer, 2020;Brito, Sebastián-Galles, & Barr, 2015), but unexpectedly no advantage was found for trilingual infants (Brito et al, 2015).…”

Section: Bilingual Advantage In Infancymentioning

confidence: 94%

“…For many years, the inhibition of the non-target language during language production was the dominant account to explain the bilingual advantage (Green, 1998;Philipp, Gade, & Koch, 2007). However, more contemporary views propose that the continuous practice of monitoring and selecting languages by bilinguals may enhance a general control mechanism in bilinguals relative to monolinguals (Bialystok, Craik, Green, & Gollan, 2009), or that the bilinguals' more variable language environments promote greater exploratory behavior, even before speech production (D'Souza, Brady, Haensel, & D'Souza, 2020). Accounts that de-emphasize the role of bilingual speech production are supported by studies reporting bilingual advantages in preverbal infants (e.g., Kovács & Mehler, 2009a;2009b;Comishen, Bialystok, & Adler, 2019), and toddlers just starting to produce sentences (Poulin-Dubois et al, 2011).…”

Section: Bilingual Advantage In Infancymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Bilingualism affects infant cognition: Insights from new and open data

Iliaei¹,

Killam²,

Ben³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Bilingualism has been hypothesized to shape domain-general cognitive abilities across the lifespan, in what some have called the “bilingual advantage”. Here, we examined the replicability of a seminal study that showed monolingual–bilingual differences in infancy (Kovács & Mehler, 2009a) by collecting new data from 7-month-olds and 20-month-olds and reanalyzing three open datasets from 7–9 month-olds (D’Souza et al., 2020, Experiment 1; Kalashikova et al., 2020, Visual and Auditory conditions). All infants (total N = 181) were tested in an anticipatory eye movement paradigm, where they learned to use a visual and/or auditory cue to anticipate a visual reward presented consistently on one side of a screen during training, and on the opposite side of the screen at test. To correctly anticipate the reward at test, infants had to update their previously learned behavior. Across 3 out of 4 studies, results from a new analytic approach showed that 7–9 month-old bilinguals were better able to update the previously-learned response at test (a “bilingual advantage”), which could be related to bilinguals’ weaker initial learning of the contingency during the learning phase (a “monolingual advantage”). At 20 months, bilinguals performed better at test, though groups showed similar performance during the learning phase. Overall, these results show that bilingualism affects how infants process both new and updated information during learning.

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Gray matter volume differences between early bilinguals and monolinguals: A study of children and adults

Schug

Brignoni-Pérez

Jamal

et al. 2022

Human Brain Mapping

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Gray matter has been shown to be greater in early bilingual adults relative to monolingual adults in regions associated with language (Mechelli et al., 2004), and executive control (EC; Olulade et al., 2016). It is not known, however, if language experience‐dependent differences in gray matter volume (GMV) exist in children. Further, any such differences are likely not to be the same as those observed in early bilingual adults, as children have had relatively shorter duration of dual‐language exposure and/or less development of brain regions serving EC. We tested these predictions by comparing GMV in Spanish–English early bilingual and English monolingual children, and Spanish–English early bilingual and English monolingual adults (n = 122). Comparing only children revealed relatively more GMV in the bilinguals in bilateral frontal, right inferior frontal, and right superior parietal cortices (regions associated with EC). Bilinguals, however, had less GMV in left inferior parietal cortex (region associated with language). An ANOVA including these children with bilingual and monolingual adults revealed interactions of Language Background by Age Group. There were no regions of more GMV in bilinguals relative to monolinguals that were less pronounced in children than adults, despite the children's shorter dual‐language experience. There were relative differences between bilingual and monolingual children that were more pronounced than those in adults in left precentral gyrus and right superior parietal lobule (close to, but not directly in areas associated with EC). Together, early bilingual children manifest relative differences in GMV, and, surprisingly, these do not diverge much from those observed in studies of bilingual adults.

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Is mere exposure enough? The effects of bilingual environments on infant cognitive development

Cited by 52 publications

References 43 publications

Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults

Early bilingual experience is associated with change detection ability in adults

Bilingualism affects infant cognition: Insights from new and open data

Gray matter volume differences between early bilinguals and monolinguals: A study of children and adults

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