Onset of word form recognition in English, Welsh, and EnglishWelsh bilingual infants

Children raised in the home as English or Welsh monolinguals or English–Welsh bilinguals were tested on untrained word form recognition using both behavioral and neurophysiological procedures. Behavioral measures confirmed the onset of a familiarity effect at 11 months in English but failed to identify it in monolingual Welsh infants between 9 and 12 months. In the neurophysiological procedure the familiarity effect was detected as early as 10 months in English but did not reach significance in monolingual Welsh. Bilingual children showed word form familiarity effects by 11 months in both languages and also revealed an online time course for word recognition that combined effects found for monolingual English and Welsh. To account for the findings, accentual, grammatical, and sociolinguistic differences between English and Welsh are considered. To connect word forms with meanings a child must first recognize particular segmental sequences and their accentual patterns as familiar. This is needed to permit the association of a form with the relevant situation, event, object, or person— in other words, to begin to learn words in the full sense. This study was designed to answer two questions in relation to this critical first step in word learning. At what age do infants begin to recognize word forms? In what ways, if at all, does a © 2007 Cambridge University Press 0142-7164/07 $15.00 Applied Psycholinguistics 28:3 476 Vihman et al.: Infant word recognition