Bilingual infants' word segmentation abilities in a mixed dual-language task

Orena, A. J. 1, 2 & Polka, L. 1, 2

1 McGill University
2 Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music

Many studies show that young monolingual infants are sensitive to the prosodic patterns of their native language, and they can exploit this information to extract native word-forms from sentential contexts. Yet, little is known about the developmental trajectory and learning capabilities of bilingual infants in segmenting words in both of their languages. Here, we examined the word segmentation abilities of 8-month-old infants from different language backgrounds in a mixed dual-language task. In a modified Headturn Preference Procedure task, infants were familiarized with French and English sentences within the same discourse, and were then tested on their recognition of target words present in the familiarized sentences. The French- and English- monolingual infants segmented in their native language, but not in their non-native language, indicating that monolinguals' segmentation abilities are not affected even when familiarized with intersentential, language-mixed passages. The French-English bilinguals, as a group, showed positive evidence of word segmentation in both of their native languages; however, closer examination reveal that bilingual infants were only able to segment words in the language in which they were more dominant. Taken together, these results suggest a dose-response relationship between language input and word segmentation abilities, which in turn might mediate lexical acquisition.