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Bilingualism

Do bilingual babies learn when pitch changes a word's meaning sooner?

Singh L, Poh FL, Fu CS · Frontiers in psychology · 2016

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

At about one year old, babies learning both English and Mandarin already treated a change in tone as changing a word's meaning in Mandarin but not in English, whereas babies learning only Mandarin did not show this until about 18 months.

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Study at a glance

Design
Human experiment — Four infant looking-time experiments using the Switch word-learning paradigm (habituate to a word-object pairing, then test with tone-changed labels) plus a tone discrimination habituation task; groups compared by language background and age.
N
No single N: four separate groups of 18 infants each - bilingual English-Mandarin 12-13-month-olds (Experiment 1), Mandarin monolingual 12-13-month-olds in word learning (Experiment 2) and tone discrimination (Experiment 3), and Mandarin monolingual 17-18-month-olds (Experiment 4).
Population
Healthy full-term infants in Singapore: English-Mandarin bilinguals and Mandarin monolinguals aged 12-13 or 17-18 months
Outcome
Looking time to Same versus Switch (tone-changed) test trials as an index of whether tone was treated as changing word meaning; looking-time recovery to alternating tones for discrimination

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Key findings

Bilingual 12-13-month-olds looked longer when the tone changed in the Mandarin context (for both distinct and similar changes, more for distinct) but not reliably in the English context, showing language-selective use of tone. Mandarin monolinguals of the same age showed no reliable reaction to tone changes in word learning, even though another group of them could clearly discriminate the same tones in a non-word task. By 17-18 months, Mandarin monolinguals did notice both similar and distinct tone changes when learning new words.

Methodology

Infants saw a moving novel object paired with the word 'pa' spoken in Mandarin Tone 3 until they got bored (habituated), then heard the same object named with Tone 1 (a distinct change) or Tone 2 (a similar change). Longer looking to the changed label was taken to mean the infant treated tone as part of the word. Bilingual 12-13-month-olds did this in both a Mandarin and an English naming context; Mandarin monolinguals were tested at 12-13 months and again, in a new group, at 17-18 months. A separate group of 12-13-month-old monolinguals completed a simple tone discrimination task.

Limitations

Each group had only 18 infants, and bilinguals and monolinguals were different children, so background differences between the groups cannot be ruled out. The discrimination task in Experiment 3 used a different paradigm from the word-learning task, so it is not a perfectly matched comparison, as the authors note. All tests used a single syllable and Tone 3 as the base, which is the most complex and late-acquired Mandarin tone, so the monolingual delay might be specific to these stimuli. The explanations for the bilingual advantage (better cognitive control, metalinguistic awareness from cross-language conflict, or heightened pitch sensitivity) were proposed but not tested.

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