Development
Does bilingualism keep babies open to unfamiliar faces and sounds?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Bilingual infants maintain the ability to distinguish unfamiliar foreign speech sounds but still lose the ability to tell apart unfamiliar other-race faces.
Key findings
Both monolingual and bilingual infants successfully discriminated native speech contrasts and own-race Chinese faces. However, only bilingual infants showed a significant increase in looking time when presented with the unfamiliar non-native Hindi speech contrast. Crucially, neither group of infants was able to discriminate the unfamiliar other-race African faces, demonstrating that bilingualism's protective effect against perceptual narrowing did not transfer from language to face processing.
Methodology
The researchers studied a group of 32 Chinese infants who were around 10 to 11.5 months of age. There were 16 monolingual infants with at least 90% exposure to English, and 16 bilingual infants with at least 25% exposure to Mandarin. Each infant participated in separate habituation tasks measuring their ability to distinguish native speech sounds, foreign Hindi speech sounds, own-race Chinese faces, and other-race African faces.
Limitations
The study used a small sample of 32 Chinese infants, meaning the findings might not generalize to other cultural or ethnic backgrounds. Furthermore, because exposure to multiple languages is an environmental variable rather than a randomized treatment, this study cannot definitively prove a causal link. Additionally, African faces were the sole other-race stimulus used, leaving it unclear if infants would respond differently to other-race faces they might occasionally encounter, such as Caucasian faces. Finally, the researchers could not videotape trials for off-line verification, meaning looking times could not be double-checked by a second, blind coder.
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