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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Dec 8, 2025

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Published on: February 8, 2019

Selectivity in bilingual nonspeech label learning.

Katharine Graf Estes¹, Dylan M Antovich¹, Erica L Verde¹

¹University of California, Davis, USA.

Journal of Child Language

|September 24, 2020

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Bilingual infants show less openness to non-speech sounds in word learning compared to monolinguals. This suggests that exposure to two languages may help bilinguals better distinguish meaningful speech from non-speech sounds.

Keywords:

bilingualism infancy language acquisition perceptual narrowing phonological development word learning

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Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Dec 8, 2025

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Defining the Role Of Language in Infants' Object Categorization with Eye-tracking Paradigms

Published on: February 8, 2019

Examining Bilingual Language Control Using the Stroop Task

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Published on: February 26, 2020

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Linguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Bilingual infants exhibit greater openness to non-native speech sounds in object labels than monolinguals.
Previous research indicates monolingual infants can learn object labels with nonspeech tones at 14 months but not 19 months.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether the enhanced openness to non-native sounds in bilingual infants extends to nonspeech sounds.
To examine the word-learning selectivity of bilingual infants using nonspeech tones as object labels.

Main Methods:

Presented 14- and 19-month-old bilingual infants with object labels composed of nonspeech tones.
Compared learning outcomes of bilingual infants to previously reported monolingual data on the same task.

Main Results:

Bilingual infants failed to learn object labels presented as nonspeech tones at both 14 and 19 months.
This contrasts with monolingual infants who showed learning at 14 months but not 19 months.

Conclusions:

Bilingual infants demonstrate selectivity against nonspeech forms as word labels.
Exposure to phonological variation in two languages may enhance bilinguals' ability to reject non-speech word forms, promoting efficient word learning.