Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Singh, Leher
• Tan, Annabel R.Y.
• Lee, Kang
• Quinn, Paul C.

Titel

Sensitivity to race in language comprehension in monolingual and bilingual infants

Ist Teil von

• Journal of experimental child psychology, 2020-11, Vol.199, p.104933-104933, Article 104933

Ort / Verlag

United States: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •We studied visually-mediated word recognition in monolingual and bilingual infants.•Familiar word-object pairings were associated with own- or other-race speakers.•Fixation to labelled objects was tracked for correct and mispronounced words.•Only word recognition in monolingual infants varied by speaker race.•Bilingual infants had race-neutral responses to correct and mispronounced words. Past studies suggest that monolingual and bilingual infants respond differently to race information in face discrimination and social learning tasks. In particular, bilingual infants have been shown to respond more similarly to own- and other-race individuals, in contrast to monolingual infants, who respond preferentially to own-race individuals. In the current study, we investigated monolingual and bilingual sensitivity to speaker race in spoken word recognition. Two-year-old infants were presented with spoken words in association with visual targets. Words were presented in association with own- or other-race actors and were either correctly pronounced or mispronounced. Measuring speech-responsive eye movements to visual targets, we analyzed fixation to visual targets for correct and mispronounced words in relation to speaker race for each group. When presented with own-race speakers, both monolingual and bilingual infants associated correctly pronounced labels, but not mispronounced labels, with visual targets. When presented with other-race speakers, bilingual infants responded similarly. In contrast, monolingual infants did not fixate visual targets regardless of whether words were correctly pronounced or mispronounced by an other-race speaker. Results are discussed in terms of the sensitivities of bilingual and monolingual infants to novelty, learned associations between race and language, and prior social experiences.