A multi-lab study of bilingual infants: Exploring the preference for infant-directed speech.

Abstract

From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet, IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multi-site study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants' IDS preference. As part of the multi-lab ManyBabies 1 project, we compared lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 385 monolingual infants' preference for North-American English IDS (cf. ManyBabies Consortium, 2020: ManyBabies 1), tested in 17 labs in 7 countries. Those infants were tested in two age groups: 6-9 months (the younger sample) and 12-15 months (the older sample). We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, amongst bilingual infants who were acquiring North-American English (NAE) as a native language, greater exposure to NAE was associated with a stronger IDS preference, extending the previous finding from ManyBabies 1 that monolinguals learning NAE as a native language showed a stronger preference than infants unexposed to NAE. Together, our findings indicate that IDS preference likely makes a similar contribution to monolingual and bilingual development, and that infants are exquisitely sensitive to the nature and frequency of different types of language input in their early environments.