MONOLINGUALS WITHIN A MONOLINGUAL CONTEXT DEMONSTRATE SIMILAR LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENTS TO MONOLINGUALS WITHIN A MULTILINGUAL CONTEXT

Abstract

Infants demonstrate marked development in language ability over their first year of life, where development and refinement of the phonology and phonological rules of their native language occurs. Monolingual research has focused on pure monolingual samples who live in a homogenous society with little variation in language exposure. Conversely, in Singapore, there exists a linguistically diverse society where infants are directly or indirectly exposed to variations in phonology that may or may not apply to their native language. Here, Singaporean-Chinese 24-month-old English monolinguals were engaged in two tasks: discrimination of native and non-native speech sounds, and a phonological assimilation task which measures infants' understanding of their native phonological rules. Reflecting the results of previous studies, 24-month-old infants in this study were able to discriminate speech sounds relevant to their native language but not speech sounds irrelevant to their native language. Similar to previous works, infants here were also sensitive to word-final phoneme changes in mispronounced labels of objects but considered word-final phoneme changes as acceptable in contexts allowing for phonological assimilation. The present results suggest a generalization of previous results on monolinguals from homogenous societies to monolinguals residing in a heterogenous language environment.