Faster Orientation Latencies Toward Native Language in Two-Month-Old Infants

Ghislaine Dehaene‐Lambertz · Derek Michael Houston

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Phonetics and Phonology Research Language Development and Disorders Neuroscience and Music Perception

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that infants can discriminate native and non-native speech from an early age. Prosody may be essential to this ability. In this paper, we assess the amount of linguistic information needed by 2-month-old infants to recognize whether or not a sentence belongs to their native language. We conducted a cross-linguistic study of French and American 2-month-old infants, measuring the latency of the first ocular saccade toward a loudspeaker playing short French and English utterances. The results indicated a significant interaction between the infants' nationality and the language of the stimuli. Infants oriented faster to their native language, even when the utterances were short (1.2 s mean). However, eliminating the prosodic organization (scrambled words condition) of the sentences, neutralized the effect. The results confirm that prosody plays a predominant role when young infants process continuous speech, and that short utterances are sufficient to recognize a language as long as prosodic information is present and coherent across the utterance.

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1984Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life 1992Linguistic Experience Alters Phonetic Perception in Infants by 6 Months of Age 2009Language Acquisition: The State of the Art 2019Elements of General Phonetics 1988A precursor of language acquisition in young infants 1983Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed 1989A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants 1999Signal to Syntax; Bootstrapping from Speech to Grammar in Early Acquisition

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