Poster #111 - Influence of Linguistic and Ethnic Contextual Cues on Word Learning in Bilingual and Monolingual Infants

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

During the first two years of life, infants rapidly acquire the phonetics and early word forms of their native language(s). This poses a unique challenge for children growing up in a multicultural, multilingual environment. Monolingual children need to determine who is a native speaker, and hence who to learn from, while bilingual children need to acquire the words of each of their two languages. One potential cue is the co-occurrence between each language and its broader culture (ethnic race, music, food, etc.) (Kandhadai, Danielson, & Werker, 2014). Prior work has found evidence consistent with this idea and demonstrated that infants can match a familiar language to a familiar ethnicity (Uttley et al., 2013) and can even learn specific pairings between ethnicity and language (May, Baron, & Werker, in prep). Research has not yet examined whether infants use these cues in word learning to selectively attend to native phonologies.

We sought to address this question by assessing 18-month-old Chinese-English bilinguals’ (n = 36) and English monolinguals’ (n = 36) ability to use linguistic and ethnic cultural cues to prioritize a native phonetic language distinction in a word learning task. In the experiment, infants viewed Priming Trials featuring videos of women reading a children's story. For each language group, half of the infants received Chinese Priming Trials (i.e., East Asian Women who spoke Cantonese or Mandarin) and half received English Priming Trials (i.e., Caucasian Women who spoke English). In between Priming Trial blocks, infants were trained on two novel object labels which contrasted in both an English-only consonant contrast (i.e., /va/ vs. /fa/) and a Chinese-only tone contrast (i.e., rising vs. falling tone on the syllables). To test their learning, infants were shown the two objects side-by-side and heard a familiarized word (repeated six times) with a mismatched consonant and tone. Thus, a test word's consonant matched one of the object's labels (English-match object) and tone matched the other object's label (Chinese-match object). In the two seconds after the first test word, bilingual infants looked equally to the two objects regardless of type of priming; however, English monolinguals preferred to look to the English-match object when exposed to English Priming but not when exposed to Chinese Priming (Figure 1). Infants' looking behavior after the remaining five test words did not differ from chance.

We did not find evidence, in this paradigm, of bilingual toddlers using contextual cues to prioritize one versus the other native phonetic language distinction, but did find evidence that monolingual infants preferentially attend to their native language's phonetic distinction when provided native language's context cues. Thus, monolinguals appear to be sensitive to linguistic and ethnic context cues and use these cues to guide who to learn from, whereas bilinguals are either not sensitive, or require more information than was provided in the priming, to differentially use one or the other native phonology. This work expands our understanding of the relation between culture and language and suggests that such a relationship may operate differently for monolingual and bilingual infants.

Authors

• Jennifer Campbell, UBC
  Presenting Author

• Janet F. Werker, University of British Columbia
  Non-Presenting Author