To trace how age and language experience shape the discrimination of native and non-native phonetic contrasts, we compared 4-year-olds learning either English or French or both and simultaneous bilingual adults on their ability to discriminate the English /d-th/ contrast. Findings show that the ability to discriminate the native English contrast improved with age. However, in the absence of exp...

Computational modeling and bilingualism have had until recently only limited interactions (see reviews in French & Jacquet, 2004; Hernandez, Li, & MacWhinney, 2005; Li & Farkas, 2002; Thomas & van Heuven, 2005). Bilingualism has been the norm rather than the exception in our globalized world, but the acquisition of two languages entails significant complexity that challenges empirical methodolo...

A word has many senses, and each sense can be mapped into many target words. Therefore, to select the appropriate translation with a correct sense, the sense of a source word should be disambiguated before selecting a target word. Based on this observation, we propose a hybrid method for translation selection that combines disambiguation of a source word sense and selection of a target word. Kn...

How does a child rapidly acquire and develop a structured mental organization for the vast number of words in the first years of life? How does a bilingual individual deal with the even more complicated task of learning and organizing two lexicons? It is only until recently have we started to examine the lexicon as a dynamical system with regard to its acquisition, representation, and organizat...

The world’s demographics are in a state of flux. Approximately half of the world’s population is bilingual (Grosjean, 2010). Just over half of all Europeans speak a language other than the official language in a given country, and 25% of them report that they are able to hold a conversation in at least two additional languages (European Commission, 2012, p. 18). Biand multilingualism are also t...

To investigate the effect of concurrent instruction in Dutch and English on reading acquisition in both languages, 23 pupils were selected from a school with bilingual education, and 23 from a school with education in Dutch only. The pupils had a Dutch majority language background and were comparable with regard to social-economic status (SES). Reading and vocabulary were measured twice within ...

The proposed project involves the design and implementation of a novel computational model of simultaneous acquisition of two languages from birth, or bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA). More specifically, we explore computationally the theory of Phonological Bootstrapping (Christophe et al. 1994, Christophe and Dupoux 1996, Morgan and Demuth 1996, Christophe et al. 1997), working with...

Evidence indicates that many monolingual preschool children in the U.S. do not receive a sufficient amount of early language input needed to develop subsequent literacy skills. The situation is potentially more complex for the bilingual child whose linguistic input is split between at least two languages. In this paper we report results from two studies. In the first, we tested 18 bilingual Pol...

Past research finds that monolingual and bilingual children prefer native speakers to individuals who speak in unfamiliar foreign languages or accents. Do children in bilingual contexts socially distinguish among familiar languages and accents and, if so, how do their social preferences based on language and accent compare? The current experiments tested whether 5- to 7-year-olds in two bilingu...