Byers-Heinlein, K.
Concordia University, Canada
Infants growing up in bilingual environments must build a language system that accommodates two languages. An important task for these infants is to discriminate and differentiate their languages. While it is easy to imagine an early bilingual environment that neatly packages the two languages in a way that facilitates this task (e.g. one-parent-one-language), most bilingual infants do not encounter their languages in this way. This talk will present evidence that bilingual infants typically hear their two languages in bilingual contexts: spoken by the same person, in the same situation, and/or within the same sentence. Experimental work is beginning to reveal how bilingual infants cope with the bilingual nature of their input, including language discrimination and the processing of code switched speech. These findings will be discussed in the context of the PRIMIR framework of infant speech perception and word learning.