Tone perception abilities of typically developing and infants at risk of dyslexia from monolingual and bilingual language backgrounds

Molnar, M. , Lallier, M. & Carreiras, M.

Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). Donostia. Spain

It has been established that stress cues (e.g., duration or pitch) are particularly important for accurately segmenting speech as early as 8 months of age in monolingual infants (e.g., Jusczyk and Aslin, 1995); also, stress cues seem to contribute to the early development of phonological organization (e.g., Jusczyk, Goodman & Baumann). As performance on stress discrimination and identification tasks has been linked with reading and phonological processing (Clin, Wade-Woolley and Heggie, 2009), the current project was designed to investigate whether infants who are at risk of reading disorders would exhibit disadvantage in a stress processing task as compared to their not at risk peers. Since it is unclear whether early exposure to two languages as opposed to one would alter stress processing skills in the first year of life, we also recruited infants raised in bilingual families. Using the habituation preference procedure, we have tested 9-month-old infants with four different backgrounds: Spanish monolingual and Basque-Spanish bilingual infants with no reported family history of dyslexia, and Spanish monolingual and Basque-Spanish bilingual infants with known family history of dyslexia. We have examined infants? ability of perceptually grouping tones that varied in terms of duration and pitch. Previous cross-language experiments with monolingual infants and adults also showed that listeners have different perceptual grouping preferences based on the specific phrasal stress patterns of their native language (Iversen et al., 2008; Yoshida et al., 2010). Our preliminary results suggest that linguistic background and at risk status affect stress perception in infancy.