TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Herold, Birgit A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Language specific prosodic preferences during the first year of life : evidence from German and French infants Y1 - 2009 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01636383 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2009.03.004 SN - 0163-6383 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Serres, Josette A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Effect of bilingualism on lexical stress pattern discrimination in french-learning infants JF - PLoS one N2 - Monolingual infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language around 6 to 9 months of age, a fact marked by the development of preferences for predominant prosodic patterns and a decrease in sensitivity to non-native prosodic properties. The present study evaluates the effects of bilingual acquisition on speech perception by exploring how stress pattern perception may differ in French-learning 10-month-olds raised in bilingual as opposed to monolingual environments. Experiment 1 shows that monolinguals can discriminate stress patterns following a long familiarization to one of two patterns, but not after a short familiarization. In Experiment 2, two subgroups of bilingual infants growing up learning both French and another language (varying across infants) in which stress is used lexically were tested under the more difficult short familiarization condition: one with balanced input, and one receiving more input in the language other than French. Discrimination was clearly found for the other-language-dominant subgroup, establishing heightened sensitivity to stress pattern contrasts in these bilinguals as compared to monolinguals. However, the balanced bilinguals' performance was not better than that of monolinguals, establishing an effect of the relative balance of the language input. This pattern of results is compatible with the proposal that sensitivity to prosodic contrasts is maintained or enhanced in a bilingual population compared to a monolingual population in which these contrasts are non-native, provided that this dimension is used in one of the two languages in acquisition, and that infants receive enough input from that language. Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0030843 SN - 1932-6203 VL - 7 IS - 2 PB - PLoS CY - San Fransisco ER - TY - GEN A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Early prosodic acquisition in bilingual infants BT - the case of the perceptual trochaic bias T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language before 12 months, as shown by the emergence of a trochaic bias in English-learning infants between 6 and 9 months (Jusczyk et al., 1993), and in German-learning infants between 4 and 6 months (Huhle et al., 2009, 2014), while French-learning infants do not show a bias at 6 months (Hohle et al., 2009). This language-specific emergence of a trochaic bias is supported by the fact that English and German are languages with trochaic predominance in their lexicons, while French is a language with phrase-final lengthening but lacking lexical stress. We explored the emergence of a trochaic bias in bilingual French/German infants, to study whether the developmental trajectory would be similar to monolingual infants and whether amount of relative exposure to the two languages has an impact on the emergence of the bias. Accordingly, we replicated Hohle et al. (2009) with 24 bilingual 6-month-olds learning French and German simultaneously. All infants had been exposed to both languages for 30 to 70% of the time from birth. Using the Head Preference Procedure, infants were presented with two lists of stimuli, one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /GAba/ with word-initial stress (trochaic pattern), the second one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /gaBA/ with word-final stress (iambic pattern). The stimuli were recorded by a native German female speaker. Results revealed that these French/German bilingual 6-month olds have a trochaic bias (as evidenced by a preference to listen to the trochaic pattern). Hence, their listening preference is comparable to that of monolingual German-learning 6-month-olds, but differs from that of monolingual French-learning 6-month-olds who did not show any preference (Noble et al., 2009). Moreover, the size of the trochaic bias in the bilingual infants was not correlated with their amount of exposure to German. The present results thus establish that the development of a trochaic bias in simultaneous bilinguals is not delayed compared to monolingual German-learning infants (Hohle et al., 2009) and is rather independent of the amount of exposure to German relative to French. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 435 KW - bilinguals KW - infants KW - language KW - prosody KW - lexical stress KW - dominance effects Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-407225 IS - 435 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Early Prosodic Acquisition in Bilingual Infants: The Case of the Perceptual Trochaic Bias JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language before 12 months, as shown by the emergence of a trochaic bias in English-learning infants between 6 and 9 months (Jusczyk et al., 1993), and in German-learning infants between 4 and 6 months (Huhle et al., 2009, 2014), while French-learning infants do not show a bias at 6 months (Hohle et al., 2009). This language-specific emergence of a trochaic bias is supported by the fact that English and German are languages with trochaic predominance in their lexicons, while French is a language with phrase-final lengthening but lacking lexical stress. We explored the emergence of a trochaic bias in bilingual French/German infants, to study whether the developmental trajectory would be similar to monolingual infants and whether amount of relative exposure to the two languages has an impact on the emergence of the bias. Accordingly, we replicated Hohle et al. (2009) with 24 bilingual 6-month-olds learning French and German simultaneously. All infants had been exposed to both languages for 30 to 70% of the time from birth. Using the Head Preference Procedure, infants were presented with two lists of stimuli, one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /GAba/ with word-initial stress (trochaic pattern), the second one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /gaBA/ with word-final stress (iambic pattern). The stimuli were recorded by a native German female speaker. Results revealed that these French/German bilingual 6-month olds have a trochaic bias (as evidenced by a preference to listen to the trochaic pattern). Hence, their listening preference is comparable to that of monolingual German-learning 6-month-olds, but differs from that of monolingual French-learning 6-month-olds who did not show any preference (Noble et al., 2009). Moreover, the size of the trochaic bias in the bilingual infants was not correlated with their amount of exposure to German. The present results thus establish that the development of a trochaic bias in simultaneous bilinguals is not delayed compared to monolingual German-learning infants (Hohle et al., 2009) and is rather independent of the amount of exposure to German relative to French. KW - bilinguals KW - infants KW - language KW - prosody KW - lexical stress KW - dominance effects Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00210 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 7 SP - 1753 EP - 1802 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Variability and stability in early language acquisition BT - comparing recognition and bilingual infants' speech perception and word recognition JF - Bilingualism : language and cognition N2 - Many human infants grow up learning more than one language simultaneously but only recently has research started to study early language acquisition in this population more systematically. The paper gives an overview on findings on early language acquisition in bilingual infants during the first two years of life and compares these findings to current knowledge on early language acquisition in monolingual infants. Given the state of the research, the overview focuses on research on phonological and early lexical development in the first two years of life. We will show that the developmental trajectory of early language acquisition in these areas is very similar in mono- and bilingual infants suggesting that these early steps into language are guided by mechanisms that are rather robust against the differences in the conditions of language exposure that mono- and bilingual infants typically experience. KW - language acquisition KW - bilingual infants KW - bilingual phonological KW - development KW - bilingual lexical development KW - simultaneous bilingualism Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000348 SN - 1366-7289 SN - 1469-1841 VL - 23 IS - 1 SP - 56 EP - 71 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - GEN A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Variability and stability in early language acquisition BT - Comparing monolingual and bilingual infants' speech perception and word recognition T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - Many human infants grow up learning more than one language simultaneously but only recently has research started to study early language acquisition in this population more systematically. The paper gives an overview on findings on early language acquisition in bilingual infants during the first two years of life and compares these findings to current knowledge on early language acquisition in monolingual infants. Given the state of the research, the overview focuses on research on phonological and early lexical development in the first two years of life. We will show that the developmental trajectory of early language acquisition in these areas is very similar in mono- and bilingual infants suggesting that these early steps into language are guided by mechanisms that are rather robust against the differences in the conditions of language exposure that mono- and bilingual infants typically experience. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 683 KW - language acquisition KW - bilingual infants KW - bilingual phonological development KW - bilingual lexical development KW - simultaneous bilingualism Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-469718 SN - 1866-8364 IS - 683 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - van Ommen, Sandrien A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Larraza, Saioa A1 - Wellmann, Caroline A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Language-specific prosodic acquisition BT - a comparison of phrase boundary perception by French- and German-learning infants JF - Journal of memory and language: JML N2 - This study compares the development of prosodic processing in French- and German-learning infants. The emergence of language-specific perception of phrase boundaries was directly tested using the same stimuli across these two languages. French-learning (Experiment 1, 2) and German-learning 6- and 8-month-olds (Experiment 3) listened to the same French noun sequences with or without major prosodic boundaries ([Loulou et Manou] [et Nina]; [Loulou et Manou et Nina], respectively). The boundaries were either naturally cued (Experiment 1), or cued exclusively by pitch and duration (Experiment 2, 3). French-learning 6- and 8-month-olds both perceived the natural boundary, but neither perceived the boundary when only two cues were present. In contrast, German-learning infants develop from not perceiving the two-cue boundary at 6 months to perceiving it at 8 months, just like German-learning 8-month-olds listening to German (Wellmann, Holzgrefe, Truckenbrodt, Wartenburger, & Hohle, 2012). In a control experiment (Experiment 4), we found little difference between German and French adult listeners, suggesting that later, French listeners catch up with German listeners. Taken together, these cross-linguistic differences in the perception of identical stimuli provide direct evidence for language-specific development of prosodic boundary perception. KW - Prosody KW - Acquisition KW - Language-specific KW - Perception KW - Infant KW - Prosodic boundaries Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104108 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 112 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER -