Development of coronal stop perception: bilingual infants keep pace with their monolingual peers.
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.
Sundara
Megha
M
School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. megha.sundara@humnet.ucla.edu
Polka
Linda
L
Molnar
Monika
M
D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests; D013067:Speech Perception