TY - JOUR
T1 - A multilab study of bilingual infants : exploring the preference for infant-directed speech
AU - Byers-Heinlein, Krista
AU - Tsui, Angeline Sin Mei
AU - Bergmann, Christina
AU - Black, Alexis K.
AU - Brown, Anna
AU - Carbajal, Maria Julia
AU - Durrant, Samantha
AU - Fennell, Christopher T.
AU - Fiévet, Anne-Caroline
AU - Frank, Michael C.
AU - Gampe, Anja
AU - Gervain, Judit
AU - Gonzalez-Gomez, Nayeli
AU - Hamlin, J. Kiley
AU - Havron, Naomi
AU - Hernik, Mikolaj
AU - Kerr, Shila
AU - Killam, Hilary
AU - Klassen, Kelsey
AU - Kosie, Jessica E.
AU - Kovács, Ágnes Melinda
AU - Lew-Williams, Casey
AU - Liu, Liquan
AU - Mani, Nivedita
AU - Marino, Caterina
AU - Mastroberardino, Meghan
AU - Mateu, Victoria
AU - Noble, Claire
AU - Orena, Adriel John
AU - Polka, Linda
AU - Potter, Christine E.
AU - Schreiner, Melanie S.
AU - Singh, Leher
AU - Soderstrom, Melanie
AU - Sundara, Megha
AU - Waddell, Connor
AU - Werker, Janet F.
AU - Wermelinger, Stephanie
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) compared with adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multisite study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the multilab ManyBabies 1 project, we compared preference for North American English (NAE) IDS in lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 384 monolingual infants tested in 17 labs in seven countries. The tested infants were in two age groups: 6 to 9 months and 12 to 15 months. We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and the two groups did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, among bilingual infants who were acquiring NAE as a native language, greater exposure to NAE was associated with a stronger IDS preference. These findings extend the previous finding from ManyBabies 1 that monolinguals learning NAE as a native language showed a stronger IDS preference than infants unexposed to NAE. Together, our findings indicate that IDS preference likely makes similar contributions to monolingual and bilingual development, and that infants are exquisitely sensitive to the nature and frequency of different types of language input in their early environments. (This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 798658.)
AB - From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) compared with adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multisite study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the multilab ManyBabies 1 project, we compared preference for North American English (NAE) IDS in lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 384 monolingual infants tested in 17 labs in seven countries. The tested infants were in two age groups: 6 to 9 months and 12 to 15 months. We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and the two groups did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, among bilingual infants who were acquiring NAE as a native language, greater exposure to NAE was associated with a stronger IDS preference. These findings extend the previous finding from ManyBabies 1 that monolinguals learning NAE as a native language showed a stronger IDS preference than infants unexposed to NAE. Together, our findings indicate that IDS preference likely makes similar contributions to monolingual and bilingual development, and that infants are exquisitely sensitive to the nature and frequency of different types of language input in their early environments. (This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 798658.)
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:60122
U2 - 10.1177/2515245920974622
DO - 10.1177/2515245920974622
M3 - Article
SN - 2515-2459
VL - 4
SP - 1
EP - 30
JO - Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
JF - Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science
IS - 1
ER -