Bosch Laura, Sebastián-Gallés Núria
Department of Psychology University of Barcelona.
Infancy. 2001 Jan;2(1):29-49. doi: 10.1207/S15327078IN0201_3. Epub 2001 Jan 1.
Previous research data indicate that soon after birth, infants from monolingual families can discriminate utterances drawn from languages that differ prosodically, but discrimination between rhythmically similar languages, such as English and Dutch, has not yet been established by 2 months of age. In the case of bilinguals, the question of how early they can distinguish between the languages of exposure remains unanswered. The goal of this study was to analyze language discrimination capacities in 4-month-old bilingual infants simultaneously exposed to 2 Romance languages belonging to the same rhythmic category, Spanish and Catalan. Using a familiarization-preference procedure, 2 groups of bilingual-to-be infants showed a capacity to discriminate between these 2 familial languages. Moreover, when compared with 2 groups of infants from monolingual environments, the size of the observed effects was the same. These results can be taken as initial evidence of an early capacity to distinguish languages in simultaneous bilingual exposure, thus challenging the hypothesis that language discrimination capacities are delayed in bilinguals.
先前的研究数据表明，单语家庭的婴儿在出生后不久就能区分韵律不同的语言发出的语音，但到2个月大时，他们仍无法区分节奏相似的语言，如英语和荷兰语。对于双语婴儿而言，他们能多早区分所接触的两种语言这一问题仍未得到解答。本研究的目的是分析同时接触属于同一节奏类别的两种罗曼语（西班牙语和加泰罗尼亚语）的4个月大双语婴儿的语言辨别能力。通过使用熟悉偏好程序，两组未来的双语婴儿表现出区分这两种家庭语言的能力。此外，与两组来自单语环境的婴儿相比，观察到的效果大小相同。这些结果可被视为早期同时接触双语时具备区分语言能力的初步证据，从而对双语者语言辨别能力会延迟的假设提出了挑战。
