ERIC Number: EJ796538
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2008-Jul
Pages: 11
Abstractor: Author
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0010-0277
EISSN: N/A
Development of Coronal Stop Perception: Bilingual Infants Keep Pace with Their Monolingual Peers
Sundara, Megha; Polka, Linda; Molnar, Monika
Cognition, v108 n1 p232-242 Jul 2008
Previous studies indicate that the discrimination of native phonetic contrasts in infants exposed to two languages from birth follows a different developmental time course from that observed in monolingual infants. We compared infant discrimination of dental (French) and alveolar (English) place variants of /d/ in three groups differing in language experience. At 6-8 months, infants in all three language groups succeeded; at 10-12 months, monolingual English and bilingual but not monolingual French infants distinguished this contrast. Thus, for highly frequent, similar phones, despite overlap in cross-linguistic distributions, bilingual infants performed on par with their English monolingual peers and better than their French monolingual peers. (Contains 2 figures and 2 tables.)
Descriptors: Infants, Monolingualism, French, Language Enrichment, Bilingualism, Phonetics, Auditory Perception, Distinctive Features (Language), Foreign Countries
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: France
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A