Language proximity and speech perception in young bilinguals

Abstract

Linguistic experience shapes speech perception from the earliest stages of development. Infants growing up in bilingual contexts are exposed to a more complex linguistic input from which they will gradually build language-specific phonetic and phonological categories, eventually characterizing words in their early lexicons. Input languages can show different levels of proximity relative to their rhythmic, phonetic, phonological, or lexical properties. Does language proximity affect early speech perception processes, from language differentiation to perceptual narrowing and phonological representation of words in the bilinguals’ vocabulary? Data from infants growing up in Catalan-Spanish contexts, acquiring a close pair of Romance languages, are reviewed and contrasted with data from infants exposed to more distant language pairs. It is argued that language proximity can determine specific adjustments in bilinguals’ early phonetic perception and phonological encoding of words. Language proximity factors can account for differences among bilingual infants’ trajectories previously reported in the literature.