Development of coronal stop perception: Bilingual infants keep pace with their monolingual peers

• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.12.013
• Publication Date: 2008-05-30T09:41:54Z
• Authors: Megha Sundara; Linda Polka; Monika Molnar
• Keywords: Male; 4. Education; 05 social sciences; Multilingualism; Phonetics; Child, Preschool; Speech Discrimination Tests; Speech Perception; Humans; Female; 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences; Child; 10. No inequality

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.