Effect of Bilingualism on Lexical Stress Pattern Discrimination in French-Learning Infants

Ranka Bijeljac-Babic · Josette Serres · Barbara Höhle · Thierry Nazzi

64 citations0/0 files storedPLoS ONE

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Phonetics and Phonology Research Language Development and Disorders Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Abstract

Monolingual infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language around 6 to 9 months of age, a fact marked by the development of preferences for predominant prosodic patterns and a decrease in sensitivity to non-native prosodic properties. The present study evaluates the effects of bilingual acquisition on speech perception by exploring how stress pattern perception may differ in French-learning 10-month-olds raised in bilingual as opposed to monolingual environments. Experiment 1 shows that monolinguals can discriminate stress patterns following a long familiarization to one of two patterns, but not after a short familiarization. In Experiment 2, two subgroups of bilingual infants growing up learning both French and another language (varying across infants) in which stress is used lexically were tested under the more difficult short familiarization condition: one with balanced input, and one receiving more input in the language other than French. Discrimination was clearly found for the other-language-dominant subgroup, establishing heightened sensitivity to stress pattern contrasts in these bilinguals as compared to monolinguals. However, the balanced bilinguals' performance was not better than that of monolinguals, establishing an effect of the relative balance of the language input. This pattern of results is compatible with the proposal that sensitivity to prosodic contrasts is maintained or enhanced in a bilingual population compared to a monolingual population in which these contrasts are non-native, provided that this dimension is used in one of the two languages in acquisition, and that infants receive enough input from that language.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 64 citations exist upstream.

References

1984Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life 2022The World Atlas of Language Structures Online 1988A precursor of language acquisition in young infants 2003Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning 1993Infants' Preference for the Predominant Stress Patterns of English Words 1998Language discrimination by newborns: Toward an understanding of the role of rhythm.1999The Beginnings of Word Segmentation in English-Learning Infants 2007Phonetic learning as a pathway to language: new data and native language magnet theory expanded (NLM-e)

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.