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Social Interaction in Infants' Learning of Second-Language Phonetics: An Exploration of Brain-Behavior Relations
Barbara T Conboy1, Rechele Brooks, Andrew N Meltzoff
1a Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington , Seattle , Washington.
Abstract:
Infants learn phonetic information from a second language with live-person presentations, but not television or audio-only recordings. To understand the role of social interaction in learning a second language, we examined infants' joint attention with live, Spanish-speaking tutors and used a neural measure of phonetic learning. Infants' eye-gaze behaviors during Spanish sessions at 9.5-10.5 months of age predicted second-language phonetic learning, assessed by an event-related potential measure of Spanish phoneme discrimination at 11 months. These data suggest a powerful role for social interaction at the earliest stages of learning a new language.
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