Consequences of short-term language exposure in infancy on babbling.

Abstract

Kuhl et al. [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 100, 9096–9101 (2003)] showed that the decline in the discrimination of non-native perceptual contrasts observed during development can be reversed with short-term exposure to a non-native language. In this poster, the question of whether short-term exposure also impacts the speech produced by infants is addressed. For this purpose, 9–10-month-old infants from monolingual English-speaking households were exposed to Spanish for a total of 5 h over 6 weeks (12 25-min sessions). At the end of this exposure, babbling data were collected from the infants in two sessions with (a) an English-speaking parent and (b) a Spanish-speaking research assistant. In this experiment, adult listeners were tested in their ability to identify the babbling produced by these infants as English or Spanish. Canonical syllables and multi-syllabic utterances from these sessions were played to adult native speakers of English and Spanish, who identified the tokens as English or Spanish using a forced-choice paradigm. Results will be discussed in the context of the literature on short-term exposure as well as the effects of social interactions on language acquisition.