Bilingual beginnings as a lens for theory development: PRIMIR in focus

Abstract

PRIMIR (Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional InteractiveRepresentations; Werker & Curtin, 2005;Curtin & Werker, 2007) is a framework that encompasses the bidirectional relations between infant speech perception and the emergence of the lexicon. Here, we expand its mandate by considering infants growing up bilingual. We argue that, just like monolinguals, bilingual infants have access to rich information in the speech stream and by the end of their first year, they establish not only language--specific phonetic category representations, but also encode and represent both sub--phonetic and indexical detail. Perceptual biases, developmental level, and task demands work together to influence the level of detail used in any particular situation. In considering bilingual acquisition, we more fully elucidate what is meant by task demands, now understood both in terms of external demands imposed by the language situation, and internal demands imposed by the infant (e.g. different approaches to the same apparent task taken by infants from different backgrounds). In addition to the statistical learning mechanism previously described in PRIMIR, the necessity of a comparison--contrast mechanism is discussed. This refocusing of PRIMIR in the light of bilinguals more fully explicates the relationship between speech perception and word learning in all infants.

Language nonselective lexical access in bilingual toddlers

“…Perhaps most suitable to explaining our results is the PRIMIR (Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Interactive Representations) framework, which has been recently adapted to infants growing up in a bilingual environment (Curtin, Byers-Heinlein, & Werker, 2011). According to PRIMIR, the different representation spaces organize speech input based on the characteristics of that input.…”

Bilingualism and increased attention to speech: Evidence from event-related potentials

“…Indeed, bilingual infants have been shown to discriminate similar sounding phonemes from different languages earlier than their monolingual peers (Sundara & Scutellaro, 2011). A mechanism that tracks and classifies incoming speech sounds based on statistical properties, as in PRIMIR (Curtin, Byers-Heinlein, & Werker, 2011), would be beneficial in situations in which there is no control over upcoming stimuli (i.e. listening to speech) and that these stimuli can unexpectedly be of a different class (i.e.…”

Consonantes, vocales y niveles de especificación en las representaciones fonológicas del primer léxico: una revisión

“…The model proposes the existence of different levels of representation, describes mechanisms that can modify the existing representations and includes a series of dynamic filters that allow preferential access to certain levels of representation depending on the age, lexical stage or task characteristics. The model has been recently expanded to include aspects of perception and lexical representation in bilingual children (Curtin, Byers-Heinlein and Werker, 2011). The authors also hypothesize about a gradual building of phonological representations, from the initial storing of possible word-forms which contain highly detailed acoustic-phonetic information, to phonemic representation that would gradually emerge during the second year of life, with phonemes placed at an abstract level of representation.…”