Presentation by Ines Sohn
Ines Juhee Sohn, Bonnie K. Lau
Through the Life Sciences Summer Undergraduate Research Program (LSSURP) at the University of Minnesota, Ines investigated bilingual infants’ perceptual narrowing, their ability to identify phonemes native to their own languages, in their first year of life. They compared “typically developing” monolingual and bilingual infants’ phoneme sensitivity and found that the two groups of infants were largely similar — both could identify phonemes of all languages around 4 months of age, but were only able to distinguish phonemes from their native language(s) around 8-12 months of age. Due to the potential confounds of acoustic similarity in stimuli selection and the similarity between chosen languages, more research is necessary to clarify the bilingual phoneme sensitivity timeline.
