Review
Bilingualism in infancy: first steps in perception and comprehension

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Many children grow up in bilingual families and acquire two first languages. Emerging research is advancing the view that the capacity to acquire language can be applied equally to two languages as to one but that bilingual and monolingual acquisition nonetheless differ in some nontrivial ways. To probe the first steps toward acquisition, researchers recently have begun to use experimental methods to study preverbal bilingual infants. We review the literature in this growing field, focusing on how infants growing up bilingual use surface acoustic information to separate, categorize and begin to learn their two languages. These new data invite the expansion of standard linguistic theories to account for how a single architecture can support the acquisition of two languages simultaneously.

Section snippets

Language discrimination

Language discrimination is an essential task for the bilingual infant. Infants born into a monolingual home need to treat all the speech they hear or see as comprising a single language, whereas bilingual infants need to distinguish and separate speech input into two languages. Even in the one-person-one-language context, the infant needs to determine which differences between speakers are characteristics of the individual speaking and which are characteristics of the language they are using

Setting up sound systems

The smallest unit in language is the phonetic segment, the individual consonant and vowel sounds that comprise syllables and words. Very young infants are able to discriminate many consonant and vowel distinctions that are used in the world's languages, but sensitivity to nonnative distinctions declines over the first year of life [22] while discrimination of native distinctions sharpens [23]. Converging evidence from studies of maternal speech 24, 25, artificial language learning studies with

Word recognition and word learning

Word learning is a multifaceted task even for the monolingual infant. Among other things, it involves pulling a word out of the stream of speech, learning its phonetic form, linking the form to meaning, assigning it to a grammatical class and representing information about the word in the mental lexicon. The bilingual child has to apply these processes to two different languages and must ultimately establish two separable mental lexicons (see Box 3 for a discussion of measuring vocabulary size

Conclusion

Infants growing up bilingual face the remarkable challenge of acquiring two communicative systems simultaneously. In this paper we have reviewed almost all of the published research to date that has employed experimental methods to assess the first steps taken by infant bilinguals as they begin the process of acquiring two languages. From the initial studies that have been conducted, the field has advanced considerably. Early perceptual sensitivities have been shown to assist infants growing up

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