Early Lexical Access in Spanish and English

What is it about?

This study contrasts toddlers' understanding of the relation between words and the things to which they refer (referents) in Spanish and English. In particular, it uses the time that it takes toddlers to touch images of these referents on a touchscreen monitor (haptic response). This gives us a measure of how quickly they can access these word-referent relations. Roughly one-third of the toddlers heard mostly English (at least 80%), one-third heard mostly Spanish, and one-third heard both Spanish and English from birth.

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Why is it important?

It is rare for a study to contrast bilingual children (those who were exposed to both Spanish and English) with same-age peers in each of their languages. This is a strength of our study. Also, only a handful of studies assess access to word meaning in very young bilinguals. This is important to understanding how learning one language from birth is the same and different from learning two languages from birth. Finally, haptic response is a relatively new approach to assessing children's access to word meaning so this paper contributes to our understanding of how this approach can be used to further our knowledge about children's early understanding of the relation between words and their referents and how this varies across languages, particularly in children exposed to two languages from birth.