Bilingual infants' acquisition and perception of phonemes

几乎所有关于婴儿语言发展的实验工作都集中在单语婴儿身上。然而，由于移民、官方语言政策以及文化偏好和规范，许多婴儿在双语环境中长大。从出生起学习两种语言的任务可能并不容易，因为婴儿必须比学习一种语言的婴儿学习更多的语言声音和单词。尽管有这些潜在的困难，但双语婴儿确实会在相当的时间内通过语言里程碑，比如第一个单词的开始，如果考虑到来自两种语言的单词，他们的词汇量与只会说一种语言的人相似。然而，人们对习得两种语言的语音和单词的学习过程知之甚少。双语者是否会走一条与单语者不同的道路来达到类似的目标？我建议进行两组研究，考察双语者对音素的习得和使用情况，音素是语言中最小的有意义的声音单位。目的是确定学习两种语言的婴儿是如何习得这些发音的(例如，[b]和[d])，以及他们如何使用或误用音素来消除词典中发音相似的单词(例如，“bog”和“og”)的歧义。第一组研究将通过调查：1)单语者是否能在实验室诱导的双语环境中学习音素，以及2)双语婴儿的自然语言暴露是否导致这些学习者在音素辨别方面的直接差异，来探索习得模式。第二组研究将调查双语婴儿在早期单词学习中的音素使用情况。第一年在音素辨别方面的差异是否会导致第二年在单词学习中使用这些音素的差异？通过对双语婴儿的研究，我们可以对所有婴儿的语言发展有更深入的了解。此外，这些研究的发现将对父母和教育工作者具有实际意义，揭示年轻的双语者是如何获得语言的，并识别可能给他们带来困难的声音。

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.