Behavioral studies have shown that while young infants can discriminate many different phonetic contrasts, a shift from a language-general to a language-specific pattern of discrimination is found during the second semester of life, beginning earlier for vowels than for consonants. This age-related decline in sensitivity to perceive non-native contrasts has been generally attested in monolinguals. In order to analyze the impact of bilingual exposure on the perception of native-sound contrasts and the early building of language-specific contrastive categories, four-month-old and eight-month-old infants from Spanish monolingual, Catalan monolingual and Spanish-Catalan bilingual environments have been tested with a familiarization-preference procedure on a vowel contrast present only in Catalan: /e/-/epsilon/. As expected, younger infants were all able to perceive this contrast, independently of the language of exposure. However, by eight months, only infants from Catalan monolingual environments succeeded. Although the decline in sensitivity with the monolingual Spanish group was expected, the results with the bilingual group challenge the view that mere exposure is enough to maintain the capacity to perceive a contrast. An additional experiment at 12 months of age indicated that bilinguals finally regained discrimination. Together these results suggest a specific developmental pattern of perceptual reorganization in bilingual exposure.

Previous research data indicate that soon after birth, infants from monolingual families can discriminate utterances drawn from languages that differ prosodically, but discrimination between rhythmically similar languages, such as English and Dutch, has not yet been established by 2 months of age. In the case of bilinguals, the question of how early they can distinguish between the languages of exposure remains unanswered. The goal of this study was to analyze language discrimination capacities in 4‐month‐old bilingual infants simultaneously exposed to 2 Romance languages belonging to the same rhythmic category, Spanish and Catalan. Using a familiarization‐preference procedure, 2 groups of bilingual‐to‐be infants showed a capacity to discriminate between these 2 familial languages. Moreover, when compared with 2 groups of infants from monolingual environments, the size of the observed effects was the same. These results can be taken as initial evidence of an early capacity to distinguish languages in simultaneous bilingual exposure, thus challenging the hypothesis that language discrimination capacities are delayed in bilinguals.

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Bilingual infants succeed at learning their first two languages. What adaptive processes enable them to master the more complex nature of bilingual input? One possibility is that bilingual infants take greater advantage of the redundancy of the audiovisual speech that they usually experience during social interactions. Thus, we investigated whether bilinguals’ need to keep languages apart increases their attention to the mouth as a source of redundant and reliable speech cues. We measured selective attention to talking faces in 4-, 8-, and 12-month-old Catalan- and Spanish- monolingual and bilingual infants. Monolingual data paralleled previous findings, whereas bilingual data suggested an emerging move away from the eyes beginning earlier in development, followed by increasing attention to the mouth from 8 to 12 months of age. Thus, bilingual infants exploit the greater perceptual salience of redundant audiovisual speech cues earlier and longer than monolinguals to support their dual language acquisition processes.