Building phonotactic knowledge in bilinguals: role of early exposure.
Timing and amount of exposure to a 2nd language in the acquisition of phonotactic restrictions was examined in 4 experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, 10-month-old monolingual and bilingual Catalan-Spanish infants were presented with nonwords that were phonotactically legal or illegal in Catalan and phonotactically illegal in Spanish. Differences between the 4 groups of infants were obtained as a function of language dominance. In Experiments 3 and 4, adult Spanish-Catalan bilinguals were compared with the same materials. Catalan-dominant bilinguals were more accurate than Spanish-dominant bilinguals in their perception of legal sequences; however, they were not more accurate with illegal sequences. The findings suggest a complex correlation between the pattern of preference and the amount and timing of exposure.
Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain. sebastia@psico.psi.ub.es
Núria
N
Sebastián-Gallés
Laura
L
Bosch
D000367:Age Factors; D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D011897:Random Allocation; D014110:Touch