The development of phonetic representation in bilingual and monolingual infants

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Abstract

The development of native language phonetic representations in bilingual infants was compared to that of monolingual infants. Infants (ages 6–8, 10–12, and 14–20 months) from English–French or English-only environments were tested on their ability to discriminate a French and an English voice onset time distinction. Although 6- to 8-month-olds responded similarly irrespective of language environment, by 10–12 months both groups of infants displayed language-specific perceptual abilities: the monolinguals demonstrated realignment to the native English boundary whereas the bilinguals began discriminating both native boundaries. This suggests that infants exposed to two languages from birth are equipped to phonetically process each as a native language and the development of phonetic representation is neither delayed nor compromised by additional languages.

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Discriminiationi of synthetic speech sounds was studied in 1- and 4-month-old infants. The speech sounds varied along an acoustic dimension previously shown to cue phonemic distinctions among the voiced and voiceless stop consonants in adults. Discriminability was measured by an increase in conditioned response rate to a second speech sound after habituation to the first speech sound. Recovery from habituation was greater for a given acoustic difference when the two stimuli were from different adult phonemic categories than when they were from the same category. The discontinuity in discrimination at the region of the adult phonemic boundary was taken as evidence for categorical perception.

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Native-language recognition abilities in 4-month-old infants from monolingual and bilingual environments.

Laura Bosch, Núria Sebastian-Galles (1997)

This study examined the capacity of 4-month-old infants to identify their maternal language when phonologically similar languages are contrasted, using a visual orientation procedure with a reaction time measure. Infants from monolingual and bilingual environments were compared in order to analyze whether differences in linguistic background affect this behavioral response. In experiment 1 the validity of the procedure was assessed with a pair of phonologically dissimilar languages (Catalan or Spanish vs. English). In experiment 2, 20 infants from monolingual environments tested in a similar language contrast (Catalan vs. Spanish) indicated that discrimination is already possible at that age. Results from experiment 3, using low-pass filtered utterances, suggested that infants can rely on information about supra-segmental features to make this distinction. For the infants growing up in bilingual environments no preference for either of the familiar languages was found. Moreover, when their maternal language was contrasted either with English or with Italian, in both cases the bilingual group showed a similar pattern, consisting of significantly longer latencies for the familiar language. Possible interpretations of this unexpected pattern of results are discussed and its implications for bilingual language acquisition are considered.