Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of California Los Angeles, United States of America.
Department of Linguistics, University of California Los Angeles, United States of America.
Cognition. 2022 Jan;218:104936. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104936. Epub 2021 Oct 20.
We asked whether increased exposure to iambs, two-syllable words with stress on the second syllable (e.g., guitar), by way of another language - Spanish - facilitates English learning infants' segmentation of iambs. Spanish has twice as many iambic words (40%) compared to English (20%). Using the Headturn Preference Procedure we tested bilingual Spanish and English learning 8-month-olds' ability to segment English iambs. Monolingual English learning infants succeed at this task only by 11 months. We showed that at 8 months, bilingual Spanish and English learning infants successfully segmented English iambs, and not simply the stressed syllable, unlike their monolingual English learning peers. At the same age, bilingual infants failed to segment Spanish iambs, just like their monolingual Spanish peers. These results cannot be explained by bilingual infants' reliance on transitional probability cues to segment words in both their native languages because statistical cues were comparable in the two languages. Instead, based on their accelerated development, we argue for autonomous but interdependent development of the two languages of bilingual infants.
我们探讨了通过西班牙语等其他语言增加对抑扬格（即重音在第二个音节上的双音节词，如 guitar）的接触是否有助于英语学习婴儿分割抑扬格。西班牙语中具有两倍数量的抑扬格单词（40%），而英语中则有 20%。我们使用头动偏好程序测试了双语西班牙语和英语学习的 8 个月大婴儿分割英语抑扬格的能力。只有到 11 个月大时，单语英语学习的婴儿才能成功完成此任务。我们发现，双语西班牙语和英语学习的婴儿在 8 个月大时成功分割了英语抑扬格，而不仅仅是重读音节，这与他们的单语英语学习同伴不同。在相同的年龄，双语婴儿无法分割西班牙语抑扬格，就像他们的单语西班牙语同伴一样。这些结果不能用双语婴儿依赖于两种母语的过渡概率线索来分割单词来解释，因为这两种语言中的统计线索是可比的。相反，我们认为，基于他们加速的发展，双语婴儿的两种语言是自主但相互依存的发展。
