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Using Speech Sounds to Guide Word Learning: The Case of Bilingual Infants
Author(s) -
Fennell Christopher T.,
ByersHeinlein Krista,
Werker Janet F.
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01080.x
Subject(s) - psychology , neuroscience of multilingualism , language acquisition , language development , linguistics , word learning , word (group theory) , task (project management) , vocabulary development , cognition , homogeneous , vocabulary , developmental psychology , teaching method , mathematics education , philosophy , physics , management , neuroscience , economics , thermodynamics
Despite the prevalence of bilingualism, language acquisition research has focused on monolingual infants. Monolinguals cannot learn minimally different words (e.g., “bih” and “dih”) in a laboratory task until 17 months of age (J. F. Werker, C. T. Fennell, K. M. Corcoran, & C. L. Stager, 2002). This study was extended to 14‐ to 20‐month‐old bilingual infants: a heterogeneous sample (English and another language; N = 48) and two homogeneous samples (28 English–Chinese and 25 English–French infants). In all samples, bilinguals did not learn similar‐sounding words until 20 months, indicating that they use relevant language sounds (i.e., consonants) to direct word learning developmentally later than monolinguals, possibly due to the increased cognitive load of learning two languages. However, this developmental pattern may be adaptive for bilingual word learning.