Poster #111 - Monolingual and bilingual infants’ novel word learning of pitch contrasts in language and music

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Previous associative tonal word learning studies have reached incongruent findings as to whether bilingual infants are better at word-object associative learning where novel objects are mapped with non-native tones (Graf Estes & Hay, 2015). In the current study, we further this issue from three angles: using a novel pitch contrast, investigating young infants’ learning ability, and extending associative learning to the musical domain.

The research questions are:
1) What are infants’ tonal associative word learning patterns before the first year after birth?
2) Do monolingual and bilingual infants differ in such patterns?
3) Can infants learn words contrasted in musical pitch?

One-hundred non-tone-language learning monolingual and bilingual Australian infants aged 5-6 and 11-12 months were tested via an associative word learning paradigm (Stager & Werker, 1998) where novel objects were associated with a manipulated Mandarin pitch contrast in Experiment 1 (stimuli from Liu & Kager, 2014) and a violin pitch contrast in Experiment 2 (stimuli from Liu & Kager, 2017a). Results showed that bilingual infants exhibited improved associative word learning ability with linguistic pitch across ages compared to their monolingual peers, but decreased learning with musical pitch.

Despite having no prior linguistic experience with pitch related to lexical tone, bilingual infants prefer lexical over non-linguistic pitch information. Linking with previous findings, bilingual infants’ increased linguistic tonal word learning ability by the end of the first year may be related to their tonal perceptual rebound trajectory (Liu & Kager, 2017b). This further suggests that bilingual enhanced acoustic sensitivity may be utilized for linguistic purposes at this stage, reflecting perceptual flexibility and neural plasticity (Krizman, Marian, Shook, Skoe & Kraus, 2012). Additionally, the poorer performance of bilingual infants when learning novel objects contrasted in musical pitch may indicate their general orientation /resource distribution towards the domain of language facing a relatively more challenging learning environment. The overall findings, centring on the impact of bilingualism in the first year after birth, enrich the existing debate in word learning advantages between monolingual and bilingual infants.

Author

• Liquan Liu, Western Sydney University
  Presenting Author