OLA6 Bilingues

Project OLA6. Language acquisition in early simultaneous bilinguals

Responsible: T. Nazzi

Bilingual infants constitute the majority of infants across the world. In France, given population migrations, infants growing up with more than one language are become more and more numerous. However, most studies on language acquisition focus on monolingual infants, and many questions (and fears) related to bilingualism remain. The present research will explore bilingual acquisition, will try and specify how brain and behavioral plasticity allow, in an appropriate environment, the acquisition of more than one language, and will try to determine whether the developmental trajectories are similar or not to those found for monolingual acquisition. These questions will be explored at different linguistic levels, mostly the phonological and lexical levels.

At the phonological level, our previous research has found evidence for a language-specific emergence of a preference for the trochaic stress pattern in German- but not French-learning infants (Höhle et al., 2009). In the future, we will explore the developmental trajectory of French-German bilingual infants in order to determine whether they develop a trochaic bias as German-learning monolinguals, and whether this emergence is dependant on different factors such as the dominance of one language over the other, the language of the mother or of the country of residence. Following up on this, we will also study the influence of bilingualism on the emergence of segmentation abilities in French bilingual infants as a function of the rhythmic type of the second language. We will focus on the syllable-based segmentation found for French (Nazzi et al., 2006; Goyet, de Schonen & Nazzi, 2010), and explore if the emergence of this type of segmentation is delayed in infants learning a stress-based second language such as English (with trochaic-based segmentation, c.f. Jusczyk et al., 1999;) compared to another syllable-based language such as Italian or Spanish. Also, since the acquisition of two languages requires the acquisition of two repertoires of phonemes, which appears to modify the acquisition trajectory compared to monolingual acquisition (Bosch & Sebastian-Gallès, 2003), we will explore how bilingual infants use phonetic information while learning new words , et whether this use depends on the relationship between the languages of the infants (e.g. languages of the same rhythmic type or not) and on the phonetic contrasts tested (and their relation to the phonological systems of the two languages in acquisition). In parallel to this project, we will continue to study how monolingual French-learning infants use phonetic information when learning words in a foreign language (Bijeljac-Babic et al., 2009).

Publications

- Abboub, N., Bijeljac-Babic, R., Serres, J., & Nazzi, T. (in press). Processing of lexical stress at the phonological level in French monolinguals and bilinguals at 10 months. In Proceedings of the 38^th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. xx-xx), Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Other Productions