Abstract
We evaluated the impact of exposure to a second language on infants' emerging speech production skills. We compared speech produced by three groups of 12-month-old infants while they interacted with interlocutors who spoke to them in Spanish and English: monolingual English-learning infants who had previously received 5 hours of exposure to a second language (Spanish), English- and Spanish-learning simultaneous bilinguals, and monolingual English-learning infants without any exposure to Spanish. Our results showed that the monolingual English-learning infants with short-term exposure to Spanish and the bilingual infants, but not the monolingual English-learning infants without exposure to Spanish, flexibly matched the prosody of their babbling to that of a Spanish- or English-speaking interlocutor. Our findings demonstrate the nature and extent of benefits for language learning from early exposure to two languages. We discuss the implications of these findings for language organization in infants learning two languages.
Highlights
Infants demonstrate sophisticated speech perception abilities soon after birth
With data from these three groups we show that, by 12 months, infants can alter their babbling to match the prosody of English and Spanish interlocutors, but only if they have had at least some prior exposure to both languages
Infants were included in the bilingual group only if they were learning both languages at home and their daily language input was at least 20%, but no more than 80% in Spanish, based on a detailed language questionnaire administered to parents (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001; Sundara & Scutellaro, 2011)
Summary
Infants demonstrate sophisticated speech perception abilities soon after birth. Like their monolingual peers, bilingual infants in the first year of life discriminate their two languages (Byers-Heinlein, Burns & Werker, 2010; Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001), vowels in those languages (Albareda-Castellot, Pons & Sebastian-Galles, 2011; Sundara & Scutellaro, 2011), the consonants of both languages (Burns, Yoshida, Hill & Werker, 2007; García-Sierra, Rivera-Gaxiola, Percaccio, Conboy, Romo, Klarman, Ortiz & Kuhl, 2011; Sundara, Polka & Molnar, 2008; Ferjan Ramirez, Ramirez, Clarke, Taulu & Kuhl, 2017) and segment speech (Polka, Orena, Sundara & Worrall, 2017), attesting to the high degree of behavioral and neural plasticity in early acquisition.Acquiring a language involves becoming a native listener, and becoming a native speaker. If babbling at 12 months is language-specific, bilingual infants should produce longer utterances with more open syllables when interacting with a Spanish-speaking interlocutor compared to an English-speaking interlocutor. In Experiment 2, we tested monolingual English-learning 12-month-olds using the same set-up as in Experiment 1, to determine whether any previous exposure to Spanish is necessary for infants to be able to systematically alter their speech production when interacting with a Spanish-speaking interlocutor.
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