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Dual language statistical word segmentation in infancy: Simulating a language-mixing bilingual environment.
Angeline Sin Mei Tsui1,2, Lucy C Erickson3, Amritha Mallikarjunn4
1School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada.
Developmental Science
|October 16, 2020
Summary
Infants can segment words from mixed languages using phonetic cues, but they preferentially learn the last language heard. This shows a developing ability to process overlapping speech in bilingual environments.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Infants use syllable statistics to learn language.
- Segmenting overlapping languages is difficult due to conflicting cues.
- Bilingual infants must separate and track statistics of multiple languages.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate how infants segment words from two overlapping languages.
- Examine infants' ability to use phonetic cues in a simulated bilingual environment.
- Determine if infants can differentiate and learn from interleaved languages.
Main Methods:
- Three experiments with 9.5- and 12-month-old infants.
- Used artificial languages with distinct French/English and English/Finnish phonetic cues.
- Presented isolated and interleaved languages to test segmentation abilities.
Main Results:
- Infants successfully segmented words from isolated languages.
- When languages were interleaved, infants segmented words from only the last-heard language.
- This effect was consistent across different age groups and language pairs.
Conclusions:
- Infants face challenges segmenting words in language-mixing environments.
- Infants show a developing capacity to use phonetic cues for segmentation in bilingual-like settings.
- The recency effect suggests a bias towards the most recently encountered language.
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