Language discrimination in monolingual and bilingual learning infants of Spanish and Basque

Molnar, M. 1 , Gervain, J. 1, 4 & Carreiras, M. 1, 2, 3

1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). Donostia. Spain.
2 Ikerbasque. Basque Foundation for Science
3 Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea - Universidad del País Vasco
4 CNRS-Universite Paris Descartes

Our understanding on how and when infants raised in a bilingual language environment start differentiating between their two native languages is limited. It has been established that newborns use rhythmical properties as a cue for discriminating between languages they have never heard before (i.e., Ramus, 2002), and monolingual infants by 5 months of age are able to distinguish their own native (or familiar) language from an unfamiliar (non-native) one even when they belong to the same rhythmical class (i.e., Nazzi et al., 2000). However, for a bilingual infant both of the languages are familiar, therefore they must develop strategies different from those of the monolingual ones to succeed in language separation. The few studies on bilingual infants show that at 4 months they are equally adept at recognizing and discriminating their two native languages as their monolingual peers (i.e., Bosch and Sebastian-Galles, 1997); however, one study suggests that bilingual-to-be 4 –month-olds do not attend to language differences in the same way as their monolingual peers (Bosch and Sebastian-Galles, 2001).
In order to further investigate how the development of monolingual and bilingual language discrimination differ, monolingual and bilingual learning infants of Spanish and Basque in three age groups (3-4 months, 6-8 months, and 10-12 months of age) were tested using the visual habituation procedure. Discrimination abilities in response to Japanese vs. Polish (unfamiliar and rhythmically different languages), and Spanish vs. Basque (familiar and rhythmically different languages) were measured. Acoustic cues that differ across Spanish and Basque were analyzed as well, as these cues might be crucial to guide the bilingual infant toward the development of language separation.