The ontogeny of early language discrimination: Beyond rhythm

Infants can discriminate languages that belong to different rhythmic classes at birth. The ability perform within-class discrimination emerges around the fifth month of life. cues infants use between prosodically close remain elusive. Segmental information could be a potential cue, since notice vowel mispronunciations their names, show first signs word recognition and perceptual narrowing for vowels 6 months age. If have in place some proto-segmental information, most likely it is about vowels. Another cue may intonation. We tested participants using sentences Eastern Catalan, Western Catalan Spanish. two dialects Spanish same class, they are syllable-timed, but differ terms distribution, given only has vocalic reduction. distributions more comparable. However, intonational patterns. In Experiment 1, we 4.5-month-old learning and/or 2 order disentangle contribution segmental suprasegmental also low-pass filtered (Experiment 3) 4). discriminated when stimuli were natural sentences, whereas able either or sentences. research provides evidence equivalent language abilities growing up monolingual bilingual environments.