Impact of second‐language experience in infancy: brain measures of first‐ and second‐language speech perception

Barbara T. Conboy · Patricia K. Kuhl

108 citations0/0 files storedDevelopmental Science

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

Language experience 'narrows' speech perception by the end of infants' first year, reducing discrimination of non-native phoneme contrasts while improving native-contrast discrimination. Previous research showed that declines in non-native discrimination were reversed by second-language experience provided at 9-10 months, but it is not known whether second-language experience affects first-language speech sound processing. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we examined learning-related changes in brain activity to Spanish and English phoneme contrasts in monolingual English-learning infants pre- and post-exposure to Spanish from 9.5-10.5 months of age. Infants showed a significant discriminatory ERP response to the Spanish contrast at 11 months (post-exposure), but not at 9 months (pre-exposure). The English contrast elicited an earlier discriminatory response at 11 months than at 9 months, suggesting improvement in native-language processing. The results show that infants rapidly encode new phonetic information, and that improvement in native speech processing can occur during second-language learning in infancy.

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 — 108 citations exist upstream.

References

1984Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life 2003Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning 2007Phonetic learning as a pathway to language: new data and native language magnet theory expanded (NLM-e)2006Infants show a facilitation effect for native language phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months 2006Is speech learning ‘gated’ by the social brain?1998Development of language-specific phoneme representations in the infant brain 2003Simultaneous Bilingualism and the Perception of a Language-Specific Vowel Contrast in the First Year of Life 2005PRIMIR: A Developmental Framework of Infant Speech Processing

Cited by

2013Theta brain rhythms index perceptual narrowing in infant speech perception 2019The Case for Measuring and Reporting Bilingualism in Developmental Research 2015Social Interaction in Infants’ Learning of Second-Language Phonetics: An Exploration of Brain–Behavior Relations 2016Predictive coding accelerates word recognition and learning in the early stages of language development

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.