Havy, M. 1 & Nazzi, T. 1, 2
1 Paris-Descartes
2 CNRS
Several studies established that 16-17 month-old monolingual-learning infants are able to recruit fine phonetic sensitivities when learning new words (Werker et al., 2002; Havy & Nazzi, 2009). At this age, bilingual infants demonstrated some difficulties in processing consonant information of new words (Fennell et al., 2007). To date only bilinguals whose second language was rhythmically different from their dominant language were tested. The aim of this study is to evaluate to what extent the pattern of failure at this age is influenced by the rhythmic distance between both languages.
We tested bilingual French-learning 16-month-olds whose second language was either rhythmically different from French (English, German; 12 infants) or rhythmically similar (Spanish, Italian; 10 infants). We also used data of 24 monolingual infants collected in Havy and Nazzi (2009). The task consisted in the presentation of a new pair of objects with similar names (/gul/-/dul/), followed by the presentation of a third object named like one of the previous objects (e.g., /gul/). The infants had to pick among the previous two objects the other /gul/. Four trials involved voicing contrasts, the other four involved place contrasts produced by a French-speaking experimenter. These contrasts were present in all languages considered.
Overall bilinguals whose second language was rhythmically similar to the dominant language succeeded in learning new words with a level of performance (M = 63.75 %, p = .03) similar to that of monolinguals (M = 69.27 %, p < .001), (p = .32). Infants with a second rhythmically different language performed at chance (M = 51.04 %, p = .86), and were significantly below monolinguals (p < .001) and other bilinguals (p = .10). This pattern suggests that the phonetic processing of words at 16 months might be influenced by the rhythmic distance between the two languages in acquisition.