Orena Adriel John, Polka Linda
School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, McGill University, Montréal, Quebec, Canada.
Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, McGill University, Montréal, Quebec, Canada.
Infancy. 2019 Sep;24(5):718-737. doi: 10.1111/infa.12296. Epub 2019 May 13.
Previous studies show that young monolingual infants use language-specific cues to segment words in their native language. Here, we asked whether 8 and 10-month-old infants (N = 84) have the capacity to segment words in an inter-mixed bilingual context. Infants heard an English-French mixed passage that contained one target word in each language, and were then tested on their recognition of the two target words. The English-monolingual and French-monolingual infants showed evidence of segmentation in their native language, but not in the other unfamiliar language. As a group, the English-French bilingual infants segmented in both of their native languages. However, exploratory analyses suggest that exposure to language mixing may play a role in bilingual infants' segmentation skills. Taken together, these results indicate a close relation between language experience and word segmentation skills.
先前的研究表明，单语的幼儿会使用特定语言的线索来对其母语中的单词进行切分。在此，我们探讨8个月和10个月大的婴儿（N = 84）是否有能力在双语混合语境中对单词进行切分。婴儿们听了一段英法混合的段落，其中每种语言都包含一个目标单词，然后对他们识别这两个目标单词的能力进行测试。只会英语和只会法语的婴儿表现出了对其母语中单词的切分能力，但对另一种不熟悉的语言则没有。作为一个群体，英法双语婴儿对他们的两种母语都进行了切分。然而，探索性分析表明，接触语言混合可能在双语婴儿的切分技能中发挥作用。综合来看，这些结果表明语言经验和单词切分技能之间存在密切关系。
