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1. “Es una pelota, do you like the ball?”: Pitch in Spanish-English bilingual infant directed speech

   https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2025.2575381  

   Barajas, Andrea Ramirez; Cohn, Michelle; Zellou, Georgia; Graf_Estes, Katharine (October 2025, Language Learning and Development)

   Not AvailableThe goal of this research is to understand how bilingual and monolingual parents adjust their speech when talking to infants. We examined pitch characteristics of infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) with Spanish-English bilingual and English monolingual parents and their infants (8–20 months of age). Thirty-eight parent-infant dyads participated in two naturalistic play tasks. Parents spoke with a bilingual researcher to collect samples of ADS. Results showed that both parent groups produced higher maximum and average fundamental frequency in IDS than ADS, suggesting that caregivers adjust pitch similarly in IDS across registers. However, for bilinguals, the IDS versus ADS difference was larger in English than Spanish; bilingual parents differentiated IDS adjustments across languages. The analyses across word repetitions revealed that in bilingual parents’ IDS, there was no change in pitch across the first and second repetitions of target words, even when repetitions occurred in different languages. Taken together, results suggest that bilingual parents adjust their IDS pitch similarly to English-speaking monolinguals, but they differentiate English and Spanish IDS adjustments. Overall, this project contributes to our understanding of parents’ register adjustments across multilingual language learning contexts. 

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2. A phonetic model of non-native spoken word processing

   Matusevych, Yevgen; Kamper, Herman; Schatz, Thomas; Feldman, Naomi H.; Goldwater, Sharon (April 2021, Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics)

   null (Ed.)

   Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these difficulties can arise from the non-native speakers' phonetic perception. We train a computational model of phonetic learning, which has no access to phonology, on either one or two languages. We first show that the model exhibits predictable behaviors on phone-level and word-level discrimination tasks. We then test the model on a spoken word processing task, showing that phonology may not be necessary to explain some of the word processing effects observed in non-native speakers. We run an additional analysis of the model's lexical representation space, showing that the two training languages are not fully separated in that space, similarly to the languages of a bilingual human speaker. 

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3. Defining bilingualism in infancy and toddlerhood: A scoping review.

   https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1177/13670069211069067  

   Rocha-Hidalgo, J.: Barr (April 2022, The international journal of bilingualism)

   Abstract Aims and objectives: The aim of this manuscript is to provide an overview of the population and languages studied and the methods and practices surrounding the definition of bilingualism in children below age 3. Methodology: A quantitative descriptive scoping review Data and analysis: From 530 articles, we identified 127 papers (167 studies) that met our predefined criteria, of which 144 studies defined their bilingual population. Findings/conclusions: The samples investigated were predominantly western in geographical origin and languages. Percent exposure was the most common method to measure bilingualism among infants and young children, with 20% and 25% the most used cutoffs as the minimum requirement for children’s second language. We also analyzed the predictive value of these cutoffs on the likelihood that studies reported a significant difference between monolinguals and bilinguals. The stricter the inclusion requirement for bilinguals was, the higher the odds of a study to report a difference between monolingual and bilingual children. We conclude that a lack of uniformity of definition in the field may be one factor that predicts whether or not significant differences are reported. Originality: This scoping review provides developmental researchers with a unique overview of the different practices used in the field to characterize bilingual and monolingual infants/toddlers. The reported results can be used as preliminary evidence for the field to report and carefully formulate how to categorize monolinguals and bilingual infants. Significance/implications: As globalization continues to foster migration and intercultural exchange, it is essential for developmental researchers to diversify their samples and language groups. We highly encourage researchers to carefully document the definitions and rationale for all their language groups and to consider analyzing the impact of bilingualism both from a categorical and continuous approach. Keywords Bilingualism, infancy, toddlerhood, scoping review, measures, definition 

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4. Spanish input accelerates bilingual infants’ segmentation of English words

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104936  

   Mateu, Victoria E.; Sundara, M. (January 2022, Cognition)

   We asked whether increased exposure to iambs, two-syllable words with stress on the second syllable (e.g., guitar), by way of another language – Spanish – facilitates English learning infants' segmentation of iambs. Spanish has twice as many iambic words (40%) compared to English (20%). Using the Headturn Preference Procedure we tested bilingual Spanish and English learning 8-month-olds' ability to segment English iambs. Monolingual English learning infants succeed at this task only by 11 months. We showed that at 8 months, bilingual Spanish and English learning infants successfully segmented English iambs, and not simply the stressed syllable, unlike their monolingual English learning peers. At the same age, bilingual infants failed to segment Spanish iambs, just like their monolingual Spanish peers. These results cannot be explained by bilingual infants' reliance on transitional probability cues to segment words in both their native languages because statistical cues were comparable in the two languages. Instead, based on their accelerated development, we argue for autonomous but interdependent development of the two languages of bilingual infants. 

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5. Heritage speakers reveal the dynamics of bilingual language regulation

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728925000203  

   Hernandez_Santacruz, Jasmin; Torres, Julio; Kroll, Judith F (March 2025, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition)

   Abstract Bilingual speakers are prompted to remain in a single language, switch between languages, or codeswitch by regulating the concurrent activation of their language systems and adapting to the demands of the communicative context. Unlike studies that compare language switching in bilinguals in distinct interactional and geographical contexts, this study investigates heritage bilinguals who may be required to manage their home and societal languages differently within the course of a day. We examined how this variation affects linguistic and cognitive factors in spoken production. Critically, picture naming in Spanish and English appeared to rely on different mechanisms of cognitive control: greater reliance on proactive control led to decreased performance in Spanish picture naming but increased performance in English. Although convergent with findings that L2-immersed bilinguals prefer proactive control strategies, the findings with heritage bilinguals suggest that recruitment of cognitive control during speech planning is more dynamic than has been previously reported. 

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