Vois‐Tu Le Kem? Do You See the Bos? Foreign Word Learning at 14 Months

Abstract

How easily can infants regularly exposed to only one language begin to acquire a second one?In three experiments, we tested 14-month-old English and French monolingual infants' ability to learn words presented in foreign language sentence frames. Infants were trained on two novel word-object pairings and then tested using a preferential looking task. Word forms were phonetically and phonotactically legal in both languages, and cross-spliced across conditions, so only the sentence frames established the word as native or foreign. In Experiment 1, infants were taught one native and one foreign word and successfully learned both. In Experiment 2 and 3, infants were taught two foreign words, but only showed successful learning of the first word they encountered. These results demonstrate that infants can successfully learn words embedded in foreign language sentences, but this is more challenging than native word learning. More broadly, they show that the sentential context of a novel word, and not just the word form itself, influences infants' early word learning.As the world becomes increasingly multilingual, investigations into how individuals come to acquire new languages are of interest to both researchers and the public at large. While some individuals acquire a second language in middle childhood, adolescence, or adulthood, many children are exposed to a new language in daycare and other early childhood education settings. In large North American cities, upwards of 27% of children in daycare will be exposed to a language other than the one they are hearing at home (Chumak-Horbatsch, 2010). But how do infants initially exposed to only one language begin to acquire a second one? Specifically, how easily can infants learn foreign language words?Foreign word learning likely draws on many of the same capacities that support native word learning, and infants are remarkable word learners. Laboratory studies have shown that 12-to 14-month-old infants can rapidly form word-object associations

Word learning in 14-month-old monolinguals and bilinguals: Challenges and methodological opportunities

“…These findings are unexpected and contrast with previous studies that have reported successful word learning for monolingual 14-month-olds using isolated words (Werker et al, 1998) and sentence frames (da Estrela & Byers-Heinlein, 2016;Fennell & Waxman, 2010). Importantly, our task was designed to be easy and conducive to word learning.…”

“…The visual stimuli had been used in prior research examining word learning in monolingual and bilingual infants (Byers-Heinlein et al, 2013;Curtin et al, 2009;Fennell & Waxman, 2010). The auditory stimuli were recorded in our lab and were previously used in an experiment on word learning with monolingual infants (da Estrela & Byers-Heinlein, 2016).…”

Infant learning of words in a typologically distant nonnative language

“…A similar effect was found earlier in development, in French- and English-learning infants aged 1;2 tested on their ability to learn words presented in either French or English sentences (da Estrela & Byers-Heinlein, 2016). When taught one native and one nonnative word, infants could learn both of them equally well, extending infants’ ability to learn words in a nonnative language at a younger age.…”

“…In both Bijeljac-Babic et al . (2009) and da Estrela and Byers-Heinlein (2016), the two languages contrasted (French and English) were typologically relatively similar (both being Indo-European languages), though infants should distinguish them based at least on rhythmic properties (e.g., Mehler, Jusczyk, Lambertz, Halsted, Bertoncini & Amiel-Tison, 1988; Nazzi, Bertoncini & Mehler, 1998). Would the ability to learn new words extend to more typologically distant nonnative languages?…”