The first question was, when do infants that speak only one language,
notice the differences in these sounds?
So, as you can imagine for an infant, right?
Speech is coming in, there are these phonemes.
And the point is,
at what time can researchers detect the difference in the ability to,
to realize that these two languages differ in the sounds, for a mono lingual?
And then the second question, they wanted to ask was,
is this time different for a bilingual?
And of course, we'll consider this question, and
this is a question that comes up quite often, right?
Are bilinguals delayed in some way?
Are they slower because they have to process two languages?
And that's a very common question.
One that we'll have some answers for as we go through the course.
But here we can ask very easily and early, is there a delay in speech perception for
a bilingual infant, relative to a monolingual infant?
So and Bosch asked two groups of infants.
One monolingual, one bilingual, to listen to rhythmically similar sentences.
Right?
In Catalan and in Spanish, and found that about four months of age,
the monolinguals could detect the differences in the speech sounds.
And this was identical to the age at which bilingual infants could
detect these differences in the speech sounds.
So essentially, it appeared that the bilingual infants were able to
detect sounds from Catalan and Spanish, at about the same age as
a monolingual infant could tell Catalan from Spanish, or Spanish from Catalan.