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The development of spontaneous sound-shape matching in monolingual and bilingual infants during the first year.

2016; American Psychological Association; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1037/dev0000237

1939-0599

Jovana Pejović, Mónika Molnár,

Multisensory perception and integration

Recently it has been proposed that sensitivity to non-arbitrary relationships between speech sounds and objects potentially bootstraps lexical acquisition.However, it is currently unclear whether preverbal infants (e.g., before 6 months of age) with different linguistic profiles are sensitive to such non-arbitrary relationships.Here, we assessed 4and 12-month-old Basque monolingual and Spanish-Basque bilingual infants' sensitivity to cross-modal correspondences between sound symbolic non-words without syllable repetition ('buba', 'kike') and drawings of rounded and angular shapes.Our findings demonstrate that sensitivity to sound-shape correspondences emerge by 12 months of age in both monolinguals and bilinguals.This finding suggests that spontaneous soundshape matching is likely to be the product of language learning and development and may not be readily available prior to the onset of word learning.