Sundara Megha, Ward Nancy, Conboy Barbara, Kuhl Patricia K
Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles.
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Redlands.
Biling (Camb Engl). 2020 Nov;23(5):1-14. doi: 10.1017/s1366728919000853. Epub 2020 Jan 29.
We evaluated the impact of exposure to a second language on infants' emerging speech production skills. We compared speech produced by three groups of 12-month-old infants while they interacted with interlocutors who spoke to them in Spanish and English: monolingual English-learning infants who had previously received 5 hours of exposure to a second language (Spanish), English- and Spanish-learning simultaneous bilinguals, and monolingual English-learning infants without any exposure to Spanish. Our results showed that the monolingual English-learning infants with short-term exposure to Spanish and the bilingual infants, but not the monolingual English-learning infants without exposure to Spanish, flexibly matched the prosody of their babbling to that of a Spanish- or English-speaking interlocutor. Our findings demonstrate the nature and extent of benefits for language learning from early exposure to two languages. We discuss the implications of these findings for language organization in infants learning two languages.
我们评估了接触第二语言对婴儿新兴语音产生技能的影响。我们比较了三组12个月大婴儿在与用西班牙语和英语与他们交谈的对话者互动时所产生的语音：之前接受过5小时第二语言（西班牙语）接触的单语英语学习婴儿、同时学习英语和西班牙语的双语婴儿，以及未接触过西班牙语的单语英语学习婴儿。我们的结果表明，短期接触西班牙语的单语英语学习婴儿和双语婴儿，而非未接触西班牙语的单语英语学习婴儿，会灵活地使他们咿呀学语的韵律与说西班牙语或英语的对话者的韵律相匹配。我们的研究结果证明了早期接触两种语言对语言学习有益的性质和程度。我们讨论了这些发现对学习两种语言的婴儿语言组织的影响。
