Language-experience facilitates discrimination of /d- ▪/ in monolingual and bilingual acquisition of English

To trace how age and language experience shape the discrimination of native and non-native phonetic contrasts, we compared 4-year-olds learning either English or French or both and simultaneous bilingual adults on their ability to discriminate the English /d- ▪/ contrast. Findings show that the abil...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition 2006-06, Vol.100 (2), p.369-388
Main Authors: Sundara, Megha, Polka, Linda, Genesee, Fred
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age Differences
bilingual
Bilingualism
children
consonant discrimination
Contrastive Linguistics
cross-language
Discrimination Learning
English (Second Language)
facilitation
French
Language Acquisition
Language Enrichment
Language Skills
Monolingualism
Native Speakers
speech perception
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Summary:To trace how age and language experience shape the discrimination of native and non-native phonetic contrasts, we compared 4-year-olds learning either English or French or both and simultaneous bilingual adults on their ability to discriminate the English /d- ▪/ contrast. Findings show that the ability to discriminate the native English contrast improved with age. However, in the absence of experience with this contrast, discrimination of French children and adults remained unchanged during development. Furthermore, although simultaneous bilingual and monolingual English adults were comparable, children exposed to both English and French were poorer at discriminating this contrast when compared to monolingual English-learning 4-year-olds. Thus, language experience facilitates perception of the English /d- ▪/ contrast and this facilitation occurs later in development when English and French are acquired simultaneously. The difference between bilingual and monolingual acquisition has implications for language organization in children with simultaneous exposure.
ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.04.007