A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF SPEECH PERCEPTION IN INFANCY AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT AND THE IMPACT OF COGNITIVE ABILITIES ON LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Prior research suggests that bilingual infants undergo a different trajectory in the course of perceptual narrowing. The present study was designed to investigate whether speech perception ability in infant predicts later language development in a multilingual sample. A group of infants were followed up to the age of 34 months in experiment 1. Results suggest the importance of infants’ native orientation in language development. In experiment 2, the effect of bilinguals’ cognition, specifically inhibitory control and categorization ability, on auditory sensitivity to native and non-native contrasts, vocabulary development and novel word learning abilities were investigated. The finding suggests a domain-specific effect of the cognitive tasks, which does not influence linguistic domains. Similarly, a correlation between native auditory sensitivity and vocabulary development was identified, emphasizing the importance of native speech perception ability in language development.