Simultaneous Bilingualism and the Perception of a Language-Specific Vowel Contrast in the First Year of Life

Bosch, Laura; Sebastián‐Gallés, Núria

doi:10.1177/00238309030460020801

Cited by 387 publications

(346 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…32). Some kind of distributional learning mechanism is undoubtedly implicated in infants' early phonetic category learning, which begins before infants know enough words for the vocabulary-based hypothesis to be feasible (33)(34)(35); see refs. 1 and 36 for proposed learning mechanisms).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Native language governs interpretation of salient speech sound differences at 18 months

Dietrich

Swingley

Werker

2007

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

133

110

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One of the first steps infants take in learning their native language is to discover its set of speech-sound categories. This early development is shown when infants begin to lose the ability to differentiate some of the speech sounds their language does not use, while retaining or improving discrimination of language-relevant sounds. However, this aspect of early phonological tuning is not sufficient for language learning. Children must also discover which of the phonetic cues that are used in their language serve to signal lexical distinctions. Phonetic variation that is readily discriminable to all children may indicate two different words in one language but only one word in another. Here, we provide evidence that the language background of 1.5-year-olds affects their interpretation of phonetic variation in word learning, and we show that young children interpret salient phonetic variation in language-specific ways. Three experiments with a total of 104 children compared Dutch-and English-learning 18-month-olds' responses to novel words varying in vowel duration or vowel quality. Dutch learners interpreted vowel duration as lexically contrastive, but English learners did not, in keeping with properties of Dutch and English. Both groups performed equivalently when differentiating words varying in vowel quality. Thus, at one and a half years, children's phonological knowledge already guides their interpretation of salient phonetic variation. We argue that early phonological learning is not just a matter of maintaining the ability to distinguish language-relevant phonetic cues. Learning also requires phonological interpretation at appropriate levels of linguistic analysis.language acquisition ͉ lexical development ͉ phonology ͉ word learning I nfants begin to acquire their native language by learning phonetic categories (1, 2). At birth, infants seem to distinguish most of the phonetic contrasts used by the world's languages. However, over the first year, this ''universal'' capacity shifts to a language-specific pattern in which infants retain or improve categorization of native-language sounds but fail to discriminate many nonnative sounds. Children's failure to discriminate nonnative sound contrasts is actually advantageous for learning language, because it prevents children from misinterpreting within-category phonetic variation as indicating a linguistic distinction.However, whereas infants' phonetic category learning is of clear relevance to language acquisition, discrimination failure is not the only mechanism that is required for developing a native-language phonology that can correctly categorize words (3-5). Many phonetic properties of speech remain discriminable to infants even when the native language does not use these properties to distinguish words. For example, pitch variation is a salient phonetic property of speech but is not used systematically in English for marking different words (in contrast to ''tone'' languages, like Mandarin, in which syllables comprising the same phonetic segments have...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Native language governs interpretation of salient speech sound differences at 18 months

Dietrich

Swingley

Werker

2007

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

133

110

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“…Mere exposure to language(s), reflected in language dominance, may not impose significantly on learning phonemic contrasts and reorganisation of phonological systems [e.g. 65,66]. Most KEB children were receiving secondary English language input at church or in group activities, such as soccer and swimming, in which they are more likely to be passive participants/listeners than they are actively engaged in shared language experience.…”

Section: Factors Influencing Error Production In Bilingual Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonological Skills in Korean-English Bilingual Children: Phonetic Inventory and Segmental Accuracy

Kim

Ballard

McCann

2017

Clin Arch Commun Disord

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Purpose: Type of surface-level speech errors can be diagnostically valuable information to identify children with speech sound disorder (SSD). There is a lack of such information for bilingual children, which makes identifying bilingual children with SSD a significant challenge. This article reports on error production in Korean-English bilingual (KEB) children.Methods: Single-word samples were collected from 52 KEB children aged between 3;0 and 7;11. The word productions were analysed for error and compared to the existing date from monolingual English-speaking (ME) and monolingual Korean-speaking (MK) children.Results: While some children's error production was similar to what would be expected in respective monolingual children, other children produced errors that would be considered delay, atypical or even advanced for their monolingual counterparts in both of their languages. No reliable factors could be identified to determine the characteristics associated with delay, atypical or advanced error production compared to monolingual children. Conclusions:There are qualitative differences in phonological development between monolingual and bilingual children. The clinical use of available monolingual normative data is likely to lead to an inaccurate diagnosis of SSD. Small cohort studies in bilingual phonological development should not be taken as normative data in clinical practice due to heterogeneity.

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“…(a) Experience-dependent phonological interpretation Infants show evidence of learning the phonetic categories of their native language during the first year (e.g. Kuhl et al 1992;Polka & Werker 1994;Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés 2003). This perceptual tuning process has lifelong consequences in many cases (Sebastián-Gallés et al 2005) and is already a factor in toddlers' representation of words: once infants learn to attend more to the phonetic distinctions that are relevant in their native language, they use this capacity in recognizing words throughout development.…”

Section: The Use Of Word Form Knowledge In Infancy and Beyondmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contributions of infant word learning to language development

Swingley

2009

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

203

174

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Simultaneous Bilingualism and the Perception of a Language-Specific Vowel Contrast in the First Year of Life

Cited by 387 publications

References 45 publications

Native language governs interpretation of salient speech sound differences at 18 months

Native language governs interpretation of salient speech sound differences at 18 months

Phonological Skills in Korean-English Bilingual Children: Phonetic Inventory and Segmental Accuracy

Contributions of infant word learning to language development

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