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Bilingual versus monolingual infants’ novel word-action mapping before and after first-word production: Influence of developing noun-dominance on perceptual narrowing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2019

Lakshmi Gogate Open the ORCID record for Lakshmi Gogate [Opens in a new window]  and
Madhavilatha Maganti
Lakshmi Gogate*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri Columbia
Madhavilatha Maganti
Affiliation:
Ashoka University
*
Author for correspondence: Lakshmi Gogate, E-mail: gogatel@health.missouri.edu
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Abstract

This experimental study examined bilingual (English and another noun-dominant language) and monolingual (English) preverbal (10.5-month-old) and postverbal (12.5-month-old) infants’ word-action mapping. Sixteen infants in each group were habituated to dynamic video-displays of novel word-action pairings during infant-controlled habituation. They received two words, /wem/ and /bæf/, spoken synchronously with an adult shaking or looming an object, and were tested with switched versus same word-action pairings. Results revealed that for the preverbal bilingual infants, word-action mapping is intensified relative to postverbal bilingual infants. For the postverbal bilingual infants, word-action mapping is attenuated and inversely correlated with noun learning. No such differences were observed in the monolingual infants. These findings illustrate a perceptual protraction prior to word production, and accelerated perceptual narrowing to nouns after word production in bilingual infants learning two noun-dominant languages.

Keywords

early word-action mappinginfant verb learningbilingual lexical developmentperceptual narrowingbilingual education
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 148 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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