Using Speech Sounds to Guide Word Learning: The Case of Bilingual Infants

TLDR

Although bilingualism is common, language acquisition studies have largely focused on monolingual infants, and monolinguals cannot learn minimally different words such as “bih” and “dih” until about 17 months of age. This study extended the laboratory task to 14‑ to 20‑month‑old bilingual infants, sampling 48 heterogeneous children and separate homogeneous groups of 28 English‑Chinese and 25 English‑French infants. Across all samples, bilinguals failed to learn similarly sounding words until 20 months, suggesting they rely on consonant cues to guide word learning later than monolinguals—a pattern that may be adaptive despite the increased cognitive load of managing two languages.

Abstract

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.