Spoken word recognition by bilingual and monolingual children

Previous research has demonstrated a bilingual advantage in the domains of executive function and social processing, including a type of social processing tied to speech perception—listening to differences between speakers’ voices. Despite numerous studies showing an advantage, the existence of such an advantage has also been widely challenged. In the current study, we test whether monolingual and bilingual children differ in spoken word recognition for speech produced by foreign-accented speakers, as it may be the case that bilingual children have more experience with foreign-accented speech. Children completed a spoken word recognition task in which they heard high and low familiarity words (e.g., “hair” vs “loom”) mixed with noise. Logistic mixed-effects models revealed the expected effects of word familiarity (high > low) and of age (older > younger). No effect of bilingual status or of language ability were found. Although the findings do not demonstrate a benefit of bilingualism, we argue that it is important to report these findings given the controversy surrounding other bilingual advantage studies. [Work supported by NIDCD 1R03DC009851.]