Navigating Through the Noise: Infants’ Ability to Associate Language with Speaker

Abstract

From birth, infants are presented with a complex linguistic environment with a high degree of novelty and variability, and they have been shown to use a range of cues from their environment in order to facilitate the acquisition of patterns from an early age (Potter & Lew-Williams, 2019). While children have shown the ability to discriminate rhythmically-different languages and the ability to discriminate acoustically-different speakers, no previous work has been done on infants’ ability to associate language with speaker. This is despite the high relevance of such questions in bilingual households, where infants are regularly exposed to at least two speakers speaking two different languages, and where many caregivers remain uncertain about how to use their two languages when addressing their children (Byers-Heinlein & Lew-Williams, 2013). In four experiments, we used a habituation paradigm to explore infants’ ability to track which language different speakers are using. We tested English-learning infants’ ability to associate a novel language (Arabic) and a familiar language (English) with a male and a female speaker. In the first experiment, we found that monolingual 9-11-month-olds showed a trend towards making such association. In the second experiment, we tested younger infants and found that monolingual 6-8-month-olds were less likely to make such associations. In the third experiment, bilingual 9-11-month-olds, whose language experience is characterized and shaped by the existence of two languages, showed weak evidence of associating language with speaker. In the fourth experiment, we tested monolingual 9-11-month-old infants and added rich social cues to the learning phase of the experiment, which were meant to engage infants’ social attention. Pilot data suggest possible success in associating speaker with language. Our findings reinforce the idea that infants are able to process cues relevant in their language stream. But here, we find early evidence that infants are able to make language-speaker associations when presented with two languages and two speakers, even when they have no previous experience with dual language-speaker input. Furthermore, our initial findings with bilingual children raise important questions about how bilinguals’ language experience shapes the way they attend to their dual language input and how they pay attention to speakers while navigating their highly variable linguistic environments.

Keywords: Infant language learning, bilingualism, perceptual narrowing, bimodal associations, cognitive development.