Molnar, M. & Bease-Berk, M.
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). Donostia. Spain
Cross-linguistic studies have illustrated that babbling of monolingual infants varies as a function of native language background by the end of the first year (e.g., Boysson-Bardies et al., 1992). These findings have been interpreted within the babbling drift hypothesis, which theory proposes that monolingual infant babble progressively resembles the phonetic and prosodic characteristics of the linguistic environment. However, the development of babbling in bilingual infants, who have two native languages, is unclear. At the perceptual level, bilingual-to-be infants have been shown to differentiate two rhythmically similar native languages by 4-months of age (Spanish and Basque: Molnar et al., 2011; Spanish and Catalan: Bosch and Sebastian-Galles, 2001); still, it remains controversial whether preverbal bilingual infants develop differentiated language systems in their productions during the babbling period (Poulin-Dubois and Goodz, 2001). In order to investigate the developmental characteristics of bilingual babbling, in the current study, we recorded babbling samples from bilingual and monolingual infants of Basque and Spanish at 12-, and 16-months of age. Bilingual infants (Basque-dominant and Spanish-dominant) were recruited from one-parent-one-language families, and their babbling samples were recorded in two separate sessions corresponding to the two linguistic contexts (Basque and Spanish). Linguistic context of each session was induced by the language-appropriate caregiver interacting with the infant. Acoustic analysis of adult native productions of Spanish and Basque have indicated that the two languages differ in terms of the overall temporal distributions of vowels and consonants (Molnar et al., 2011). Based on these acoustic features, differences across monolingual and bilingual (by language context and language dominance) infant productions have been observed.