Monolingual and bilingual infants' word segmentation abilities in an inter-mixed dual-language task.

Abstract

Previous studies show that young monolingual infants use language-specific cues to segment words in their native language. Here, we asked whether 8 and 10-month-old infants (N=84) have the capacity to segment words in an inter-mixed bilingual context. Infants heard an English-French mixed passage that contained one target word in each language, and were then tested on their recognition of the two target words. The English-monolingual and French-monolingual infants showed evidence of segmentation in their native language, but not in the other unfamiliar language. As a group, the English-French bilingual infants segmented in both of their native languages. However, exploratory analyses suggest that exposure to language mixing may play a role in bilingual infants' segmentation skills. Taken together, these results indicate a close relation between language experience and word segmentation skills.