How do Bilingual Infants Process Variability in Speakers? An Analysis of the Effect of Early Language Environment, Talker-Specific Information and Attention in Word Segmentation

Abstract

There are many studies that focus on how infants learn language, but relatively few look at how the bilingual experience affects language processing. Bilinguals are constantly looking to find ways to make distinctions between the multiple languages they hear in their environment which ultimately makes them more likely to notice variance or contrasts in language. Due to this, they may store talker-specific information in their sound representations of words as a means of separating their languages. To test whether the bilingual experience changes infants’ attention to talker-specific information, we tested 10-month-old monolingual infants and 10 and 13-month-old bilingual infants’ ability to recognize words when they were spoken by two different people. Infants first heard either a male or a female repeat individual words, like dog or bike, in a familiarization phase and then heard a different person produce passages that either contained the words that they heard in the familiarization phase or novel words. 10-month-old monolingual infants listened longer to passages that included novel words when the familiarization was spoken by a male and the testing by a female, suggesting that they were able to recognize words when they were spoken by two different people. However, there was no significant difference between how long bilingual 10 and 13-month-old infants listened to different types of passages. These results suggest that bilingual infants may take longer to understand that the words said and not the speaker saying them is what is important to pay attention to because they put more emphasis on talker-specific information when trying to understand language.