Revisiting the talker recognition advantage in bilingual infants

Abstract

Recent work has shown that exposure to multiple languages affects nonlinguistic processing of speech during infancy. Specifically, Fecher and Johnson found that bilingual 9-month-olds outperformed their monolingual peers in a face–voice matching task in an unfamiliar language [Developmental Science (2019a), 22(4), e12778]. What factors were driving this effect? That is, was this finding truly reflective of a bilingual advantage specific to talker processing, or did the study demonstrate a general cognitive advantage in bilingual infants? Here, we revisited this question by testing bilingual and monolingual 9-month-olds (N = 48) on their ability to associate previously unknown voices with animated cartoon characters. In comparison with earlier work, where infants were presented with characters speaking an unfamiliar language (Spanish), the characters in this study spoke a language familiar to both groups of infants (English). Critically, we found that the monolingual and bilingual infants learned the face–voice pairings equally well when they were tested on the familiar language. We conclude that whereas bilingual infants are skilled at recognizing talkers regardless of the language spoken by the talkers, monolingual infants succeed at talker recognition in a familiar language only. These results begin to clarify the underlying nature of the talker recognition benefit previously reported for bilingual infants.