Early audiovisual language discrimination: Monolingual and bilingual infants’ differences in language switch detection
Successful language learning in bilinguals requires differentiation of two language systems. Capacity to discriminate rhythmically close languages has been reported in 4-month-olds using auditory-only stimuli. This research offers a novel perspective on early language discrimination using audiovisua...
| Autores: | , , |
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| Formato: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión aceptada para publicación |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2024 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/220689 |
| Acesso em linha: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/220689 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Bilingüisme en els infants Narrativa audiovisual Lingüística Bilingualism in children Visual narrative Linguistics |
| Resumo: | Successful language learning in bilinguals requires differentiation of two language systems. Capacity to discriminate rhythmically close languages has been reported in 4-month-olds using auditory-only stimuli. This research offers a novel perspective on early language discrimination using audiovisual material. Monolingual and bilingual infants were first habituated to a face talking in the participants' native language (or the more frequent language in bilingual contexts) and then tested on two successive language switches by the same speaker, with a close and a distant language. Code-switching exposure was indexed from parental questionnaires. Results revealed that while monolinguals could detect both the close- and distant-language switch, bilinguals only reacted to the distant language, regardless of home code-switching experience. In the temporal dimension, the analyses showed that language-switch detection required at least 10 seconds, suggesting that the audiovisual presentation (here the same speaker switching languages) slowed down or even hindered the language-switch detection. These results suggest that detection of a multimodal close-language switch is a challenging task, especially for bilingual infants exposed to phonologically and rhythmically close-languages. The current research sets the ground for further studies exploring the role of indexical cues and selective attention processes on language-switch detection. |
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