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Novel Word Learning in Bilingual and Monolingual Infants: Evidence for a Bilingual Advantage

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Child Development

Published online on

Abstract

Previous studies revealing that monolingual and bilingual infants learn similar sounding words with comparable success are largely based on prior investigations involving single‐feature changes in the onset consonant of a word. There have been no investigations of bilingual infants' abilities to learn similar sounding words differentiated by vowels. In the current study, 18‐month‐old bilingual and monolingual infants (n = 90) were compared on their sensitivity to a vowel change when learning the meanings of words. Bilingual infants learned similar sounding words differing by a vowel contrast, whereas monolingual English‐ and Mandarin‐learning infants did not. Findings are discussed in terms of early constraints on novel word learning in bilingual and monolingual infants.