Molnar, M. & Davidson , D.
Basque Center for Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). Donostia, Spain
We assessed whether preverbal infants from ?one parent, one language? families establish an association between their caregivers? voice and a language. Twenty-five 8-month-old Basque-Spanish bilingual infants listened to audio recordings of their caregivers speaking either in the language they use with their infant (congruent trials) or in the other language (incongruent trials). We predicted that if the infants established an association between a language and a caregivers? voice, then the incongruent trials should elicit significantly longer looking times than the congruent ones. We found no evidence that infants? looking behavior varied as a function of congruent (mean=9.5 seconds; SD=2.8) or incongruent trials (mean=9.4 seconds; SD=3). A mixed effects model with the effect of congruency did not fit the data better than one without. We found a small preference effect towards the mothers? voice, and a large habituation-dishabituation effect to the different voices. This finding suggests that sensitivity to the link between familiar voices and a specific language develops after 8 months of age, which is surprising given that Basque-Spanish bilingual infants are able to perceptually discriminate their languages by 4 months of age (Molnar, Gervain, & Carreiras, 2014).