1. Exposure to a second language in infancy alters speech production
- Author
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Megha Sundara, Nancy Ward, Patricia K. Kuhl, and Barbara T. Conboy
- Subjects
Linguistics and Language ,Speech production ,speech production ,education ,Spanish ,Basic Behavioral and Social Science ,Article ,050105 experimental psychology ,Language and Linguistics ,Babbling ,Education ,030507 speech-language pathology & audiology ,03 medical and health sciences ,English ,Clinical Research ,Behavioral and Social Science ,bilingual ,Psychology ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,Prosody ,Pediatric ,infants ,05 social sciences ,Linguistics ,Experimental Psychology ,Language acquisition ,short term bilingual experience ,Second language ,Cognitive Sciences ,0305 other medical science - Abstract
We evaluated the impact of exposure to a second language on infants’ emerging speech production skills. We compared speech produced by three groups of 12-month-old infants while they interacted with interlocutors who spoke to them in Spanish and English: monolingual English-learning infants who had previously received 5 hours of exposure to a second language (Spanish), English- and Spanish-learning simultaneous bilinguals, and monolingual English-learning infants without any exposure to Spanish. Our results showed that the monolingual English-learning infants with short-term exposure to Spanish and the bilingual infants, but not the monolingual English-learning infants without exposure to Spanish, flexibly matched the prosody of their babbling to that of a Spanish- or English-speaking interlocutor. Our findings demonstrate the nature and extent of benefits for language learning from early exposure to two languages. We discuss the implications of these findings for language organization in infants learning two languages.
- Published
- 2020
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