Journal of Child Language: Volume 48 -

Selectivity in bilingual nonspeech label learning
Katharine GRAF ESTES, Dylan M. ANTOVICH, Erica L. VERDE
Published online by Cambridge University Press:

24 September 2020, pp. 634-644
- Article
- - Get access
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
This research investigates selectivity in word learning for bilingual infants. Previous work demonstrated that bilingual infants show greater openness to non-native language sounds in object labels than monolinguals (Hay et al., 2015; Singh, 2018). It remains unclear whether bilingual openness extends to nonspeech sounds. We presented 14- and 19-month-old bilinguals with object labels consisting of nonspeech tones. Monolinguals recently displayed learning of the same labels at 14 months, but not 19 months (Graf Estes et al., 2018). In contrast, bilinguals failed to learn the labels. We propose that hearing phonological variation across two languages helps bilinguals reject nonspeech word forms.

Journal of Child Language