Liu, L. & Kager, R.
Utrecht Insititute of Linguistics - OTS, Utrecht University
It remains unclear whether mono- and bilingual infants follow the same developmental trajectories in the first year of life. While language exposure has been shown to impact language development (Hoff, 2006), only few have addressed the issue of dominance or degree of exposure (DoE) within bilingual populations. Ramon-Casas and colleagues (2009) found that sensitivity to vowel substitutions involving the Catalan-specific /e-?/ contrast was positively correlated with the proportion of Catalan in 18-26-month-old Catalan-Spanish toddlers. Garcia-Sierra and colleagues (2011) reported that 10-12-months-old English-Spanish bilingual infants' speech discrimination abilities are related to DoE in both languages. The current study focuses on consonant perception in mono- and bilingual infants', studying the effects of language exposure and dominance. 120 monolingual Dutch and 166 bilingual infants with Dutch as one L1 aged 5-6, 8-9, 11-12 and 14-15 months were tested on their discrimination of a three-way stop contrast along the VOT continuum: prevoiced /ba/, voiceless /pa/, and aspirated /pha/ via an oddity visual habituation paradigm (Houston et al., 2007). The other language of bilingual infants was English, German, Chinese (aspiration contrast /pa-/pha/), French or Spanish (prevoiced contrast /pa-ba/ as in Dutch). Infants were habituated on /pa/, and tested on the habituated /pa/ and new categories /ba/ and /pha/. Results show an initial sensitivity (5-6 months) of all infants to the acoustically salient /pa-pha/ contrast. Monolingual Dutch infants' sensitivity to /pa-ba/ increases whereas sensitivity to /pa-pha/ decreases in the first year of life. Bilingual infants retain their sensitivity to the aspiration contrast only if it occurs in one of their native languages. Besides, they are more sensitive to the contrast of their dominant language. Mono- and bilingual infants' early consonant perception is affected by language exposure. In bilingual infants, language dominance impacts their sensitivity to consonant contrasts, and may influence category formation in the first year.