The first steps in word learning are easier when the shoes fit: comparing monolingual and bilingual infants

Abstract

English, French, and bilingual English‐French 17‐month‐old infants were compared for their performance on a word learning task using the Switch task. Object names presented a /b/ vs. /g/ contrast that is phonemic in both English and French, and auditory strings comprised English and French pronunciations by an adult bilingual. Infants were habituated to two novel objects labeled ‘bowce’ or ‘gowce’ and were then presented with a switch trial where a familiar word and familiar object were paired in a novel combination, and a same trial with a familiar word–object pairing. Bilingual infants looked significantly longer to switch vs. same trials, but English and French monolinguals did not, suggesting that bilingual infants can learn word–object associations when the phonetic conditions favor their input. Monolingual infants likely failed because the bilingual mode of presentation increased phonetic variability and did not match their real‐world input. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis by presenting monolingual infants with nonce word tokens restricted to native language pronunciations. Monolinguals succeeded in this case. Experiment 3 revealed that the presence of unfamiliar pronunciations in Experiment 2, rather than a reduction in overall phonetic variability was the key factor to success, as French infants failed when tested with English pronunciations of the nonce words. Thus phonetic variability impacts how infants perform in the switch task in ways that contribute to differences in monolingual and bilingual performance. Moreover, both monolinguals and bilinguals are developing adaptive speech processing skills that are specific to the language(s) they are learning.

Treack or trit: Adaptation to genuine and arbitrary foreign accents by monolingual and bilingual listeners

“…The present findings add to evidence that the experience of becoming and remaining bilingual has consequences not only for flexibility in cognitive control and speech production, but also in speech recognition (for a recent overview on this topic see e.g., Bialystok, 2009). Bilingual infants (17-month-olds) can learn words that were produced by speakers of the infants' two languages better than monolingual infants (Mattock et al, 2010). This flexibility in how early bilinguals cope with variability in phonetic detail in lexical processing apparently extends to the late bilinguals studied here, in the way they deal with the phonetic variability inherent in foreign-accented speech.…”

“…Does becoming bilingual, including developing the ability to recognize multiple types of speech input, induce greater perceptual flexibility in lexical access? On the one hand, there are some indications that bilingualism can enhance cognitive flexibility (e.g., Bialystok, 2009;Bialystok & Martin, 2004; but see Paap & Greenberg, 2013), that bilinguals are flexible in speech production (Grosjean & Miller, 1994), and that bilingual infants show greater flexibility in word learning than monolingual infants (Mattock, Polka, Rvachew, & Krehm, 2010). On the other hand, bilinguals show no greater flexibility in speech perception than monolinguals, as indexed by the ability to discriminate the phonetic categories of an unknown language (Werker, 1986).…”

Impossible to _gnore: Word-Form Inconsistency Slows Preschool Children's Word-Learning

“…Mattock, Polka, Rvachew, and Krehm (2010) found that 17-month-old French-English bilingual infants learned accent-variable words more readily than did monolingual infants of either language. This implies that those infants either did not distinguish differences between the two variants or understood their Downloaded by [Sarah Creel] at 21:52 07 November 2013 equivalence (interestingly, Sundara, Polka, & Molnar, 2008, show that younger French-English bilingual infants can distinguish sounds between languages).…”

“…This would presumably allow quicker word learning because both variants would map to one underlying form. Presumably, extended exposure to two accents would afford development of phonological translation abilities, which would ameliorate effects of word-form inconsistency during learning (see Mattock et al, 2010, for results consistent with this account; though note that Floccia et al, 2012, is inconsistent with this account). A variant of this notion of context encoding, untested here, is that children might be aided in forming context-dependent accent variants by high cross-accent similarity; that is, learning that gif = geef (a phonetically close change) might be easier than gif = keece.…”

Children’s use of linguistic information when learning in a bilingual context

“…Although the N. Atagi et al / Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 144 (2016) 199-208 201 narrator presented one of the actors as ''only speaks English" and the other actor as ''speaks both English and Japanese," both actors were college-aged women who were actually native speakers of both Japanese and English, as was the narrator. Both the actors' English and narrator's English were judged for degree of native accent by five independent raters-all monolingual native English-speaking adults-using a 5-point scale (1 = not native-like at all, 5 = extremely native-like) (Mattock, Polka, Rvachew, & Krehm, 2010). Native-ness ratings for both the actors' and narrator's English were similar to those for a comparison monolingual native English-speaker (all ps > .95).…”