Singh Leher, Poh Felicia L S, Fu Charlene S L
Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Singapore Singapore.
Front Psychol. 2016 May 10;7:667. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00667. eCollection 2016.
To construct their first lexicon, infants must determine the relationship between native phonological variation and the meanings of words. This process is arguably more complex for bilingual learners who are often confronted with phonological conflict: phonological variation that is lexically relevant in one language may be lexically irrelevant in the other. In a series of four experiments, the present study investigated English-Mandarin bilingual infants' abilities to negotiate phonological conflict introduced by learning both a tone and a non-tone language. In a novel word learning task, bilingual children were tested on their sensitivity to tone variation in English and Mandarin contexts. Their abilities to interpret tone variation in a language-dependent manner were compared to those of monolingual Mandarin learning infants. Results demonstrated that at 12-13 months, bilingual infants demonstrated the ability to bind tone to word meanings in Mandarin, but to disregard tone variation when learning new words in English. In contrast, monolingual learners of Mandarin did not show evidence of integrating tones into word meanings in Mandarin at the same age even though they were learning a tone language. However, a tone discrimination paradigm confirmed that monolingual Mandarin learning infants were able to tell these tones apart at 12-13 months under a different set of conditions. Later, at 17-18 months, monolingual Mandarin learners were able to bind tone variation to word meanings when learning new words. Our findings are discussed in terms of cognitive adaptations associated with bilingualism that may ease the negotiation of phonological conflict and facilitate precocious uptake of certain properties of each language.
为构建他们的第一个词汇表，婴儿必须确定母语语音变化与词义之间的关系。对于经常面临语音冲突的双语学习者来说，这个过程可能更为复杂：一种语言中与词汇相关的语音变化在另一种语言中可能与词汇无关。在一系列四项实验中，本研究调查了英-汉双语婴儿应对因学习有声调语言和无声调语言而产生的语音冲突的能力。在一项新颖的单词学习任务中，对双语儿童在英语和汉语语境中对声调变化的敏感度进行了测试。将他们以语言依赖方式解释声调变化的能力与单语汉语学习婴儿的能力进行了比较。结果表明，在12至13个月时，双语婴儿表现出在汉语中将声调与词义联系起来的能力，但在学习英语新词时会忽略声调变化。相比之下，单语汉语学习者在相同年龄时，即使他们正在学习一种有声调的语言，也没有表现出将声调整合到汉语词义中的迹象。然而，一种声调辨别范式证实，单语汉语学习婴儿在12至13个月时在不同的条件下能够区分这些声调。后来，在17至18个月时，单语汉语学习者在学习新词时能够将声调变化与词义联系起来。我们从与双语相关的认知适应方面讨论了我们的发现，这些适应可能会缓解语音冲突的协商，并促进对每种语言某些特性的早熟吸收。
