Ramon-Casas, M. 1 , Santesteban, M. 3 , Bosch, L. 1, 2 & Sebastián-Gallés, N. 4
1 Basic Psychology Department, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
2 Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior (IR3C), University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
3 Psycholinguistics Laboratory, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Basque Country, Spain
4 Brain and Cognition Unit, Universitat Pompeu Fabra , Barcelona, Spain
In bilingual language acquisition, an early ability to differentiate between the ambient languages is crucial for successfully building separate linguistic systems. Languages that belong to a different rhythmic category can be easily differentiated from an early age on the basis of rhythm information alone, but within-class language discrimination probably requires access to cues other than rhythm. A later differentiation is predicted in this case and it was confirmed for Catalan-Spanish and English-Dutch languages. In this research we explore the ability to discriminate Spanish and Basque, two languages that have been described as rhythmically different, so an early and easy differentiation was expected. Data from infant and adult discrimination studies will be offered.
Three independent groups of infant participants (n=12 in each group), from monolingual Spanish environments, were tested at 4, 6 and 8 months of age using the familiarization-preference procedure. Only the older group succeeded in the task, suggesting that cues other than rhythm were required for discrimination. To explore the contribution of different cues (syllabic rhythm, global intonation and broad phonotactic cues) onto Spanish-Basque discrimination, groups of adults (L1 Spanish, n=20 in each condition) were tested using the utterances from the infant studies with different types of re-synthesis (sasasa, saltanaj with pitch and saltanaj flat). The discrimination procedure involved familiarization with a set of Spanish re-synthesized utterances followed by a yes-no recognition test for novel utterances in both languages. Results revealed that adults were able to discriminate the languages only when phonotactic information was present. Our data suggest that syllabic rhythm differences between the target languages do not provide sufficient information for an early and easy differentiation to take place. The role of several factors, such as the nature of the material in our experiments (bilingual speaker, infant-directed speech) and the participants’ native language, will be discussed.