Bilingual infants' acquisition and perception of phonemes

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Nearly all experimental work in infant language development has focused on monolingual infants. Yet, due to immigration, official language policies, and cultural preferences and norms, many infants are being raised in a bilingual environment. The task of learning two languages from birth is potentially not an easy one, as the infants have to acquire more language sounds and words than an infants learning one language. Despite these potential difficulties, bilingual infants do pass language milestones, like onset of first word, at comparable times to monolinguals and have similar sized vocabularies as monolinguals, when words from both languages are taken into account. However, relatively little is known about the learning processes involved in acquiring the sounds and words of two languages. Do bilinguals take a different path to reach similar goals as monolinguals? I propose two sets of studies examining bilinguals' acquisition and use of phonemes, the smallest meaningful units of sound in a language. The aim is to ascertain how infants learning two languages acquire these sounds (e.g., [b] and [d]) and how they use, or misuse, phonemes to disambiguate similar-sounding words in their lexicon (e.g., "bog" and "dog"). The first set of studies will explore models of acquisition by investigating if: 1) monolinguals can learn phonemes in a laboratory-induced "bilingual" setting and 2) whether bilingual infants' natural linguistic exposure, which differs greatly from that of monolinguals, leads to direct differences in phoneme discrimination between these learner populations. The second set of studies will investigate bilingual infants' phoneme use in early word learning. Will any differences seen in phoneme discrimination in the first year of life lead to differences in the use of those phonemes in word learning in the second year of life? Through studies with bilingual infants, we can gain a deeper understanding of language development in all infants. In addition, the findings that will emerge from these studies will have practical implications for parents and educators by revealing how young bilinguals acquire language, and identifying sounds that may give them difficulty.