Bilingual infants excel at foreign-language talker recognition.

Abstract

Bilingual and monolingual infants differ in how they process linguistic aspects of the speech signal. But do they also differ in how they process non-linguistic aspects of speech, such as who is talking? Here, we addressed this question by testing Canadian monolingual and bilingual 9-month-olds on their ability to learn to identify native Spanish-speaking females in a face-voice matching task. Importantly, neither group was familiar with Spanish prior to participating in the study. In line with our predictions, bilinguals succeeded in learning the face-voice pairings, whereas monolinguals did not. We consider multiple explanations for this finding, including the possibility that simultaneous bilingualism enhances perceptual attentiveness to talker-specific speech cues in infancy (even in unfamiliar languages), and that early bilingualism delays perceptual narrowing to language-specific talker recognition cues. This work represents the first evidence that multilingualism in infancy affects the processing of non-linguistic aspects of the speech signal, such as talker identity.