Acoustic detail in monolingual and bilingual children’s representations of English and Spanish

Children must learn to process variations in the pronunciation of their language(s), but they must also learn the social meaning of particular kinds of variation. By preschool, children’s initially overly specific lexical representations have generalized to reflect commonalities in pronunciations, thus allowing children to recognize accented productions as instances of familiar lexical items (Best et al., 2009; Schmale, et al., 2010, 2011, 2012; Stager and Werker, 1997). However, elementary-school-aged children struggle to use the phonetic variation present in accented speech to understand social differences among talkers (Floccia et al., 2009; Girard et al., 2008). In the present study, we investigated children’s ability to associate acoustic cues with a particular language as a function of their language background (monolingual, significant L2 exposure, or bilingual). Children decided whether nonce words containing language-specific sounds were produced by a Spanish speaker or an English speaker. Language-specific cues included phonemes unique to Spanish (/r/) or English (/ɹ, θ/), or sound categories common to both languages but produced differently in each (/l, u/). The categorization patterns and reaction times of the three groups were compared, and results indicate that children with exposure to or proficiency in Spanish categorized the nonce words more accurately than monolinguals.