September 7, 2023

In support of Singapore’s bilingual education policy, the Speak Mandarin Campaign was launched on 7 September 1979 to promote the use of Mandarin amongst Chinese Singaporeans. Besides helping Singaporeans to remain in touch with their culture and heritage, bilingualism can also be useful in learning a third language. In ‘Bilingual Infants Demonstrate Advantages in Learning Words in a Third Language’ (Child Development, 2018), Associate Professor Leher Singh (NUS Department of Psychology) discovered that when learning new words, English-Mandarin bilingual infants were sensitive to the differences between two Ndebele (a Zimbabwean language) click consonants while English monolingual infants were not, which suggests bilingual infants possess an advantage in becoming trilingual.

In one of the experiments, two groups of infants (English-Mandarin bilingual and English monolingual) were each familiarised with an object labelled by either a dental or lateral click consonant from Ndebele. In the ‘same trial’, both groups looked at the object on a visual display and heard the familiarised click consonant. Then, in the ‘switch trial’, there was a switch in the auditory label from a dental to a lateral click (or vice versa). A/P Singh found the bilingual infants to be fixated to the visual display in the ‘switch trial’ for significantly longer than in the ‘same trial’, while monolingual infants showed no differences. Thus, she concluded that the results demonstrated bilingual infants are more sensitive to phonological differences from a non-native language. However, when A/P Singh tested for sensitivity to changes in non-linguistic sounds – namely hand claps and finger snaps, she found that neither bilingual and monolingual infants were sensitive to finger snaps and hand claps as contrastive labels for newly learned words.

The article concludes that bilingual infants have an enhanced sensitivity to non-native phonological contrast language compared to monolingual infants, which translates to a possible advantage in learning a third language. However, it also acknowledges that this advantage may come at the cost of native language sensitivity and efficiency.

Read the article here.