Preschool[-aged] children's use of perceptual features to identify spoken languages

Abstract

One major question in language development is when and how young language learners identify what language(s) they are hearing. Infants can discriminate languages when at least one is familiar. We have previously demonstrated that regardless of language background, 3- to 5-year-olds accurately associate two languages with two individuals (cartoons), but how they accomplish this is unclear. Here, we test whether bilingual (n = 32) and monolingual (n = 32) children associate perceptual features versus comprehensibility with individuals. During learning, children are familiarized with two cartoon characters: one speaks Spanish sentences; the other, English. At test, children see both characters and hear four trial types: English sentences; Spanish sentences; English-like nonsense; Spanish-like nonsense. Sense and nonsense sentences are acoustically matched via bidirectional cross-splicing. On each test trial, the child points to the character who they thought spoke, while eye-movements are being recorded. If children associate language-specific phonetic cues with talkers, they will choose English-speaking characters for English-like nonsense, and Spanish-speaking characters for Spanish-like nonsense. However, English monolinguals may associate characters with (non)comprehensibility. If so, they will choose the Spanish-speaking character for all nonsense utterances. Findings will reveal how much children use low-level perceptual features in language recognition, and whether this differs between bilinguals and monolinguals.One major question in language development is when and how young language learners identify what language(s) they are hearing. Infants can discriminate languages when at least one is familiar. We have previously demonstrated that regardless of language background, 3- to 5-year-olds accurately associate two languages with two individuals (cartoons), but how they accomplish this is unclear. Here, we test whether bilingual (n = 32) and monolingual (n = 32) children associate perceptual features versus comprehensibility with individuals. During learning, children are familiarized with two cartoon characters: one speaks Spanish sentences; the other, English. At test, children see both characters and hear four trial types: English sentences; Spanish sentences; English-like nonsense; Spanish-like nonsense. Sense and nonsense sentences are acoustically matched via bidirectional cross-splicing. On each tes...