ArticleInfant and child development
Keeping track of language: Can monolingual and bilingual infants associate a speaker with the language they speak?
Article in Infant and child development. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bilingual Families Align Their Languages During Naturalistic Interactions: Evidence from Two Bilingual Communities.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Infants Do Not Reliably Track When Bilingual Speakers Switch Languages.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Effects of dual- and single-language exposure on children's word learning: Experimentally testing the role of competition.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2024Article
- Who spoke that language? Assessing early face-language associations in monolingual and bilingual infants.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Bilingual infants acquire languages in a variety of language environments. Some caregivers follow a one-person-one-language approach in an attempt to not 'confuse' their child. However, the central assumption that infants can keep track of what language a person speaks has not been tested. In two studies, we tested whether bilingual and monolingual 5-, 12- and 18-month-olds spontaneously form language-person associations. In both studies, infants were familiarized to a man and a woman, each speaking a different language, and tested on trials where they either spoke the same language or switched to a different language. In Study 1, infants only heard the speaker, and in Study 2 infants saw and heard the speaker. Bilinguals and monolinguals did not look longer to Switch compared to Same trials; there was no evidence in this task that infants form person-language associations spontaneously. Thus, our results did not support a central assumption of the one-person-one-language approach, although we cannot rule out that infants do form this association in more naturalistic contexts.
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Registered trials
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