Junge, C. 1 , Ebanks, N. 2 , Neophytou, E. 2 & Mills, D. 2
1 University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
2 Bangor University, Bangor, United Kingdom
The ability to detect words in continuous speech is vital for building a vocabulary, as it is an important early predictor of language development (Newman, Bernstein Ratner, Jusczyk, Jusczyk & Dow, 2006; Junge, Kooijman, Hagoort & Cutler, 2012). Multiple cues in the native language, such as stress patterns, can be used to segment words from speech (Jusczyk, Houston & Newsome, 1999). Segmentation abilities develop between six and 12 months, and have been tested both behaviorally and electrophysiologically. Behavioral research on bilingual infants showed that French-English 8-month-olds are not delayed in the emergence of word segmentation abilities (Polka & Sundara, 2003). However, little is known about whether bilinguals differ from monolinguals in their time course of word recognition in continuous speech. The present study therefore examined how learning simultaneously two rhythmically different languages - English and Welsh - affect 10-month-olds' speed of word recognition in running speech. Infants were first presented with 8 different utterances containing the same trochaic word (e.g., 'eagle') before recognition was tested, within novel utterances, by comparing event-related-potentials to novel tokens of the familiarized words with those of unfamiliarized control words (i.e. 'eagle' vs. 'lemming'; counter-balanced across infants). Preliminary data show that both monolingual (n=10) and bilingual infants (n=10) distinguished familiarized words from control words, as indicated in both groups by an increased negativity for familiarized words (N200-500; Kooijman, Hagoort & Cutler, 2005). Furthermore, the onset of the word recognition effect in both groups was comparable, from 220 ms onwards. This indicates that by 10 months, bilingual infants pick up novel words in running speech as quickly as monolingual infants. We are currently also testing seven-month-olds to see whether this pattern holds.