Development of coronal stop perception: bilingual infants keep pace with their monolingual peers

Cognition. 2008 Jul;108(1):232-42. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.12.013. Epub 2008 Feb 20.

Abstract

Previous studies indicate that the discrimination of native phonetic contrasts in infants exposed to two languages from birth follows a different developmental time course from that observed in monolingual infants. We compared infant discrimination of dental (French) and alveolar (English) place variants of /d/ in three groups differing in language experience. At 6-8 months, infants in all three language groups succeeded; at 10-12 months, monolingual English and bilingual but not monolingual French infants distinguished this contrast. Thus, for highly frequent, similar phones, despite overlap in cross-linguistic distributions, bilingual infants performed on par with their English monolingual peers and better than their French monolingual peers.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Child
  • Child, Preschool
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Multilingualism*
  • Phonetics*
  • Speech Discrimination Tests
  • Speech Perception*