A comparison of monolingual and bilingual toddlers' word recognition in noise

The purpose of this study was to examine whether differences in language exposure (i.e., being raised in a bilingual versus a monolingual environment) influence young children's ability to comprehend words when speech is heard in the presence of background noise.

Forty-four children (22 monolinguals and 22 bilinguals) between the ages of 29 and 31 months completed a preferential looking task where they saw picture-pairs of familiar objects (e.g., balloon and apple) on a screen and simultaneously heard sentences instructing them to locate one of the objects (e.g., look at the apple!). Speech was heard in quiet and in the presence of competing white noise.

Children's eye-movements were coded off-line to identify the proportion of time they fixated on the correct object on the screen and performance across groups was compared using a 2 × 3 mixed analysis of variance.

Bilingual toddlers performed worse than monolinguals during the task. This group difference in performance was particularly clear when the listening condition contained background noise.

There are clear differences in how infants and adults process speech in noise. To date, developmental work on this topic has mainly been carried out with monolingual infants. This study is one of the first to examine how background noise might influence word identification in young bilingual children who are just starting to acquire their languages.

High noise levels are often reported in daycares and classrooms where bilingual children are present. Therefore, this work has important implications for learning and education practices with young bilinguals.