Schott, E. & Byers-Heinlein, K.
Concordia University
Do infants associate a person with the language they speak? Advocates of the one-person-one-language approach argue that this skill could help bilingual infants acquire their languages (Doepke, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 1998). We used a looking-time paradigm to test whether 5-month-old (N = 32) and 12-month-old (N = 41) infants notice when a speaker switches the language they speak. Monolingual (English or French) and bilingual (English-French) infants were familiarized to a woman speaking English and a man speaking French (or vice-versa) while seeing a constant visual stimulus (flowers). At test, the voices either continued speaking the same language (Same trials) or switched to the other language (Switch trials). If infants notice the switch, they are expected to look longer during the Switch trials than Same trials. We found no evidence that 5-month-olds (p = .86) or 12-month-olds (p = .54) noticed the switch. Moreover, there was no interaction with infants' language background (monolingual vs. bilingual; ps > .05). Thus, we found no evidence that infants are keeping track of which person speaks which language. Ongoing research is investigating whether additional cues such as the presence of a speaker's face can promote infants' tracking of a speaker's language.