Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Geneva University, Geneva, Switzerland.
Dev Sci. 2021 Jan;24(1):e13002. doi: 10.1111/desc.13002. Epub 2020 Jul 6.
From the very first moments of their lives, infants selectively attend to the visible orofacial movements of their social partners and apply their exquisite speech perception skills to the service of lexical learning. Here we explore how early bilingual experience modulates children's ability to use visible speech as they form new lexical representations. Using a cross-modal word-learning task, bilingual children aged 30 months were tested on their ability to learn new lexical mappings in either the auditory or the visual modality. Lexical recognition was assessed either in the same modality as the one used at learning ('same modality' condition: auditory test after auditory learning, visual test after visual learning) or in the other modality ('cross-modality' condition: visual test after auditory learning, auditory test after visual learning). The results revealed that like their monolingual peers, bilingual children successfully learn new words in either the auditory or the visual modality and show cross-modal recognition of words following auditory learning. Interestingly, as opposed to monolinguals, they also demonstrate cross-modal recognition of words upon visual learning. Collectively, these findings indicate a bilingual edge in visual word learning, expressed in the capacity to form a recoverable cross-modal representation of visually learned words.
从生命的最初时刻起，婴儿就会选择性地关注社交伙伴的可见口面部运动，并将他们精湛的言语感知技能应用于词汇学习。在这里，我们探讨早期双语经验如何调节儿童利用可见言语形成新词汇表征的能力。使用跨模态单词学习任务，我们对 30 个月大的双语儿童进行了测试，以评估他们在听觉或视觉模态中学习新词汇映射的能力。词汇识别在学习时使用的相同模态中进行（“相同模态”条件：听觉学习后进行听觉测试，视觉学习后进行视觉测试）或在另一种模态中进行（“跨模态”条件：听觉学习后进行视觉测试，视觉学习后进行听觉测试）。结果表明，与单语儿童一样，双语儿童可以成功地在听觉或视觉模态中学习新单词，并在听觉学习后对单词进行跨模态识别。有趣的是，与单语儿童不同，他们在视觉学习后也能对单词进行跨模态识别。总的来说，这些发现表明双语在视觉单词学习方面具有优势，表现为能够形成可恢复的视觉学习单词的跨模态表示。
