title: The development of spontaneous sound-shape matching in monolingual and bilingual infants during the first year.
abstract: Recently it has been proposed that sensitivity to nonarbitrary relationships between speech sounds and objects potentially bootstraps lexical acquisition. However, it is currently unclear whether preverbal infants (e.g., before 6 months of age) with different linguistic profiles are sensitive to such nonarbitrary relationships. Here, the authors assessed 4- and 12-month-old Basque monolingual and Spanish-Basque bilingual infants' sensitivity to cross-modal correspondences between sound symbolic nonwords without syllable repetition (buba, kike) and drawings of rounded and angular shapes. The findings demonstrate that sensitivity to sound-shape correspondences emerge by 12 months of age in both monolinguals and bilinguals. This finding suggests that spontaneous sound-shape matching is likely to be the product of language learning and development and may not be readily available prior to the onset of word learning. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors.affiliation: BCBL-Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language.
authors.forename: Jovana
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-9375-4503
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pejovic
authors.affiliation: BCBL-Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language.
authors.forename: Monika
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Molnar
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011581:Psychological Tests; D014705:Verbal Behavior