Using Speech Sounds to Guide Word Learning: The Case of Bilingual Infants

Despite the prevalence of bilingualism, language acquisition research has focused on monolingual infants. Monolinguals cannot learn minimally different words (e.g., "bih" and "dih") in a laboratory task until 17 months of age (J. F. Werker, C. T. Fennell, K. M. Corcoran, & C....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Child development 2007-09, Vol.78 (5), p.1510-1525
Main Authors: Fennell, Christopher T., Byers-Heinlein, Krista, Werker, Janet F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age groups
Association Learning
Associative learning
Attention
Babies
Bilingual infants
Bilingualism
Bilingualism. Multilingualism
Biological and medical sciences
Child development
Chinese
Cognitive Processes
Consonants
Developmental psychology
Empirical Articles
English
Experimentation
Family environment
Family life
Family relations
Family studies
Female
French
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Habituation
Humans
Infant
Infants
Interpersonal relations
Kinship
Language
Language Acquisition
Language Development
Language Research
Language use
Learning
Linguistics
Male
Monolingualism
Morphology
Multilingualism
Newborn. Infant
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Perceptual learning
Phonemes
Phonetics
Phonology
Prevalence
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Second Language Learning
Social interaction
Speech
Speech Communication
Speech Perception
Verbal Learning
Vocabulary
Vocabulary Development
Words
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Summary:Despite the prevalence of bilingualism, language acquisition research has focused on monolingual infants. Monolinguals cannot learn minimally different words (e.g., "bih" and "dih") in a laboratory task until 17 months of age (J. F. Werker, C. T. Fennell, K. M. Corcoran, & C. L. Stager, 2002). This study was extended to 14- to 20-month-old bilingual infants: a heterogeneous sample (English and another language; N = 48) and two homogeneous samples (28 English-Chinese and 25 English-French infants). In all samples, bilinguals did not learn similarsounding words until 20 months, indicating that they use relevant language sounds (i.e., consonants) to direct word learning developmentally later than monolinguals, possibly due to the increased cognitive load of learning two languages. However, this developmental pattern may be adaptive for bilingual word learning.
ISSN:0009-3920
1467-8624
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01080.x