Language Lunch: Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein

The CRLMB Language Lunch is an informal, academic-community seminar on speech and language research. Please join us at noon on November 3rd as Krista Byers-Heinlein, (Ph.D) Dept. of Psychology, Concordia University, 聽presents "Bilingualism in infancy."

Abstract:

Infants growing up bilingual provide a fascinating window into how the human mind copes with different types of early language environments.聽 Bilingual infants must detect the two languages in their input, and adapt their learning accordingly. This talk will cover three sets of studies exploring bilingualism in the first two years of life.聽 The first set uses a high amplitude sucking technique to investigate how prenatal bilingual exposure affects language preference and language discrimination at birth.聽 The second set looks at 鈥渕utual exclusivity鈥�, and the impact of monolingualism vs. multilingualism on the development on this word learning heuristic.聽 The final set introduces a new pen-and-paper instrument for measuring language mixing by bilingual parents, and provides some preliminary evidence that hearing mixed language affects infants鈥� vocabulary size at 18 and 24 months. Together, these studies show how the tools that support language acquisition operate in monolingual and bilingual environments to enable language acquisition.