The effects of parental interaction on French-English bilingual infants’ vocalization and turn-taking rates

Abstract

Prior studies suggest that parent-infant interactions play an important role on infant volubility, which is an important indication of language development. However, little is known about how speaker and language contexts affect infant volubility in bilingual infants. In the current study, we examined how the speaker context (Mother versus Father) and the language context (French versus English) might influence bilingual infants’ rate of vocalization and turn-taking. We analyzed naturalistic daylong recordings from English-French bilingual parent/infant dyads (n = 21). Preliminary analysis showed that mothers elicited more turn-taking in their 10-month-old infants than fathers did, but they did not elicit more vocalizations. Importantly, there was no effect of language on infant vocalization or turn-taking. We will alsoreport analyses that examine whether the dominant language in the bilingual child’s input has an effect on infant volubility that is independent of talker effects. These novel findings will inform our understanding of how parent-infant interactions shape the language development of infants being raised in bilingual families.