Learning across languages: bilingual experience supports dual language statistical word segmentation.

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Bilingual acquisition presents unique challenges, including speech segmentation in multiple languages.
• Infants may utilize statistical learning, specifically transitional probabilities, to identify word boundaries.
• Monolingual infants struggle with speech segmentation when languages are interleaved, simulating bilingual input.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate 14-month-old infants' (monolingual and bilingual) ability to segment artificial languages using transitional probability cues.
• To compare segmentation performance between monolingual and bilingual infants in a dual-language context.
• To determine if real-world bilingual experience facilitates dual language speech segmentation.

Main Methods:

• Assessed 14-month-old infants' speech segmentation abilities using artificial languages and transitional probability cues.
• Experiment 1: Monolingual infants segmented individual and interleaved artificial languages.
• Experiment 2: Bilingual infants segmented interleaved artificial languages, mimicking bilingual speech.

Main Results:

• Monolingual infants successfully segmented individual language streams but failed with interleaved streams.
• Bilingual infants demonstrated successful segmentation of interleaved language streams.
• Early bilingual exposure supports the use of transitional probabilities for dual language segmentation.

Conclusions:

• Bilingual infants possess enhanced abilities to segment speech in dual language environments compared to monolingual infants.
• Early exposure to two languages equips infants with skills to navigate the complexities of bilingualism.
• Transitional probability cues are crucial for infants learning to segment words in multilingual contexts.