Non-tone-learning bilingual infants show advantages when perceiving tones
What is it about?
Non-tone-language-learning infants (e.g., Dutch) reduce their sensitivity to tones in the first year of life, but the sensitivity recovers in the second year, and eventually non-tone language adults can discriminate tones from a tone language (e.g., Mandarin). This recovery time window for bilingual infants has been found to be 6 month earlier than monolinguals in the second year of life.
Why is it important?
Bilingual advantage in early language development is rare, since it is commonly believed that learning two languages at the same time may hinder the speed of language acquisition. It has been argued that bilingual infants keep the same pace as their monolingual peers. The advantages may tell us why bilinguals keep such pace and what cues (different from monolinguals) they may adopt in learning.