The early origins of the consonant bias in word recognition: Spanish monolingual and Spanish-Catalan bilingual infants

The early origins of the consonant bias in word recognition: Spanish monolingual and Spanish-Catalan bilingual infants

Camillia Bouchon1, Camille Frey1, Nuria Sebastián-Gallés1,2, and Juan M. Toro1,2

1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Center for Brain and Cognition, Spain

2. ICREA

Consonants carry more lexical information than vowels and adults rely more on consonants than vowels in lexical tasks in many languages. Infants exhibit this consonant bias more or less early in lexical development depending on their native input (French and Italian: 8-12 months; English: 30 months). These crosslinguistic variations remain unexplained.
The impact of consonant vs. vowel mispronunciations on word recognition in Spanish during the first year will be compared in Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-Catalan bilinguals, and the influence of two differing characteristics of their input will be explored. If the C/V ratio in the phonetic system contributes more to the emergence of the consonant bias, it should occur earlier in monolinguals (exposed to a very simple vowel system in their input). If the relative C/V weight for lexical identification contributes more, it should occur earlier in bilinguals (2/3 of Spanish-Catalan cognates differ principally on vowels in their input).

Preliminary results show a vowel bias in both groups at 4 months as French infants, and a consonant bias only in bilinguals at 8 months, suggesting that the C/V importance at the lexical level has more influence than the phonetic system for the emergence of the consonant bias.