Bilingual Infants' and Toddlers' Processing of Mixed Language

 描述：美国和世界各地的许多儿童在双语环境中长大，因此在语言学习方面面临着巨大的挑战。与流行的看法相反，这些双语儿童中只有极少数在严格的一人/一人环境中长大 语言环境。相反，大多数双语儿童经常从同一个人那里听到两种不同的语言，在同一个对话中，经常在同一个句子中(即，混合语言的句子，如“看看perro！”)。虽然在揭示年轻的双语者如何处理单一语言输入方面取得了相当大的进展，但对他们如何处理混合语言输入的了解很少。拟议的国际项目利用了在双语儿童语言环境中观察到的自然复杂性，并对语言混合是否影响处理和学习提供了严格的测试。具体目标1是调查双语婴儿是否区分来自一种语言的语言和两种语言的混合。在两个初步研究的基础上，具体目标2是调查语言混合是否影响双语幼儿的实时语言加工速度。具体目标3是调查假设的语言混合处理成本是否会对语言转换后发生的识别和学习单词产生影响。之前的研究表明，双语婴儿可以分辨出两种语言中的单个声音和完整的句子，而对双语成年人的研究有力地表明，语言混合会扰乱语言处理。鉴于这些发现，我们预测双语婴儿将成功区分单一语言和混合语言语音(实验1a和1b)，并将显示语言混合的处理成本延迟单词识别(实验2a和2b)，并损害对熟悉单词的理解和下游发生的新词学习(实验3a和3b)。拟议的实验将在两个双语社区同时进行：西班牙语/英语双语儿童将在美国伊利诺伊州芝加哥进行测试，法语/英语双语儿童将在加拿大魁北克省蒙代尔进行测试。这一方法能够检查两个社区之间的差异，以解决个人层面的因素，包括社会经济地位和家庭使用混合语言如何影响双语婴儿和幼儿对混合语言的处理。研究结果将阐明双语婴幼儿如何驾驭复杂的混合语言输入，这对语言发展来说是一个重要的现实挑战。这项研究的结果将使人们对不同类型的早期双语体验的后果产生重大的健康担忧，并解决父母关于如何最好地支持双语婴儿和学步儿童的双语发展的问题。

 DESCRIPTION: Many children both in the United States and around the world grow up bilingual, and as a consequence face substantial challenges in language learning. Contrary to popular belief, only a tiny minority of these bilingual children grow up in a strict one-person/one language environment. Instead, most bilingual children regularly hear two different languages from the same person, within the same conversation, and often within the same sentence (i.e., mixed-language sentences such as "Look at the perro!"). While considerable progress has been made in uncovering how young bilinguals process single-language input, very little is known about how they process mixed-language input. The proposed international project leverages the natural complexity observed in bilingual children's language environments, and provides a rigorous test of whether language mixing impacts processing and learning. Specific Aim 1 is to investigate whether bilingual infants differentiate between speech from a single language vs. a mix of two languages. Based on two preliminary studies, Specific Aim 2 is to investigate whether language mixing influences the speed of real-time language processing in bilingual toddlers. Specific Aim 3 is to investigate whether the hypothesized processing cost of language mixing has consequences for recognizing and learning words that occur after a language switch. Previous research has shown that bilingual infants can discriminate between individual sounds as well as full sentences in their two languages, and studies with bilingual adults have shown robustly that language mixing disrupts language processing. Given these findings, we predict that bilingual infants will successfully discriminate between single-language and mixed-language speech (Experiments 1a and 1b), and will show a processing cost of language mixing that delays word recognition (Experiments 2a and 2b) and impairs the comprehension of familiar words and the learning of novel words that occur downstream (Experiments 3a and 3b). The proposed experiments will be conducted simultaneously in two bilingual communities: Spanish/English bilingual children will be tested in Chicago, IL, U.S.A., and French/English bilingual children will be tested in Montr¿al, Qu¿bec, Canada. This approach enables an examination of differences between two communities to address how individual-level factors including socioeconomic status and household use of mixed language affect bilingual infants' and toddlers' processing of mixed language. The results will illuminate how bilingual infants and toddlers navigate the complexities of mixed-language input, which presents an important real-world challenge for language development. The outcomes of this research will inform a significant health concern about the consequences of different types of early bilingual experience, and address parents' questions about how to best support dual- language development in bilingual infants and toddlers.