Kovacs, A.
Although bilingual children have to learn roughly twice as much about language as their monolingual peers, their speed of acquisition is comparable to that of monolinguals. However, it is unclear how young infants cope with the multi-language input and how bilingualism affects early development. In several eye-tracking studies we show that 7-month-old bilinguals display improved cognitive control abilities compared to matched monolinguals. Whereas both monolinguals and bilinguals rapidly learned to anticipate a reward on one side of a screen signaled by a cue, only bilinguals succeeded to inhibit this response in a second phase and to redirect their anticipatory looks when the cue began signaling the reward on the opposite side. Consecutive studies provide a crucial link between domain-general improvements in cognitive control found in 7-month-olds and specific enhancements in the domain of language acquisition. We find that 12-month-old bilinguals have become more flexible at learning speech structures than monolinguals. When given the opportunity to simultaneously learn two different regularities, bilingual infants learned both, whereas monolinguals learned only one of them. These findings show that processing representations from two languages leads to a domain-general enhancement of the cognitive control system and to an increased flexibility in learning conflicting regularities well before the onset of speech.