Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada.
Dev Sci. 2019 Jul;22(4):e12778. doi: 10.1111/desc.12778. Epub 2018 Dec 18.
Bilingual and monolingual infants differ in how they process linguistic aspects of the speech signal. But do they also differ in how they process non-linguistic aspects of speech, such as who is talking? Here, we addressed this question by testing Canadian monolingual and bilingual 9-month-olds on their ability to learn to identify native Spanish-speaking females in a face-voice matching task. Importantly, neither group was familiar with Spanish prior to participating in the study. In line with our predictions, bilinguals succeeded in learning the face-voice pairings, whereas monolinguals did not. We consider multiple explanations for this finding, including the possibility that simultaneous bilingualism enhances perceptual attentiveness to talker-specific speech cues in infancy (even in unfamiliar languages), and that early bilingualism delays perceptual narrowing to language-specific talker recognition cues. This work represents the first evidence that multilingualism in infancy affects the processing of non-linguistic aspects of the speech signal, such as talker identity.
双语和单语婴儿在处理言语信号的语言方面存在差异。但是，他们在处理言语的非语言方面是否也存在差异，例如说话者是谁？在这里，我们通过测试加拿大的单语和双语 9 个月大的婴儿在面孔-声音匹配任务中识别母语为西班牙语的女性的能力来解决这个问题。重要的是，两组在参与研究之前都不熟悉西班牙语。与我们的预测一致，双语婴儿成功地学习了面孔-声音配对，而单语婴儿则没有。我们考虑了多种解释，包括双语可能会增强婴儿对说话者特定言语线索的感知注意力（即使是在不熟悉的语言中），并且早期双语会延迟对语言特定说话者识别线索的感知缩小。这项工作首次证明了婴儿时期的多语言环境会影响言语信号的非语言方面的处理，例如说话者身份。
