April 4, 2022

Dr Leher Singh, Ms Charlene Fu, Ms Zhi Wen Tay (all of NUS Infant and Child Language Centre), and Dr Roberta Golinkoff (University of Delaware) investigate the differences in how monolingual and bilingual babies learn new words in ‘Novel Word Learning in Bilingual and Monolingual Infants: Evidence for a Bilingual Advantage’ (Child Development, 2018).

Previous research has often focused on assessing infants’ sensitivity to consonants rather than vowels when acquiring new word associations, and the article notes the problems with extrapolating research on consonant heavy non-tonal languages, such as English and French, with vowel heavy tonal languages, such as Mandarin. The study was an attempt to both bridge and extend novel word learning research away from the ‘consonant bias’ of the past towards the relatively under-researched area of vowel contrasts.

The experiments took place between February 2014 and September 2016 and involved 90 18-month-old bilingual and monolingual infants (along with their caregivers) participating in the ‘Switch’ paradigm that was conducted via computer. The ‘Switch’ paradigm consisted of exposure to two new novel objects at a time, accompanied by audio name labels that were played out loud. Once the infants’ attention levels waned and they became distracted or disinterested, the switch would take place whereby one of the objects would be named slightly differently. The resulting surprise response, expressed by prolonged staring at the novel object with a new name indicated the infants’ capacity to discern similar sounding words.

Three sets of ‘Switch’ paradigm experiments were conducted to ensure consistency and cross-referencing between the bilingual and monolingual infant groups. The aggregate results showed that there was a bilingual advantage in vowel sensitivity but not in consonant sensitivity when learning new words, and suggest that monolingual and bilingual word learners develop their word-learning abilities in different ways.

Read the full article here.