Language and dialect discrimination by five-month-olds.

Abstract

To acquire a language, infants must be able to accurately discriminate speech utterances belonging to that language. This is particularly important for infants raised in bilingual environments, who must be able to tag utterances they hear as belonging to one language or another. From birth, infants are able to discriminate languages from different rhythm classes, but not languages within the same rhythm class [Nazzi et al. (1998)]. By 5 months, infants can discriminate two languages from the same rhythm class, as long as one language is native. Johnson [(2000)] showed that English‐learning infants could discriminate English from Dutch, and even American English from British English, but not Dutch from German. We attempt to extend these results to American English and German, and American and Australian English. Preliminary results show that English‐learning 5‐month‐olds cannot discriminate American English from German but are able to discriminate American from Australian English. These results fit with previous work with adults that show discriminating between American and Australian English is easier than discriminating between American English and German, when segmental information is removed.