Previous findings indicate that bilingual Catalan/Spanish-learning infants attend more to the highly salient audiovisual redundancy cues normally available in a talker's mouth than do monolingual infants. Presumably, greater attention to such cues renders the challenge of learning two languages easier. Spanish and Catalan are, however,…

How do early bilingual experiences influence children's neural architecture for word processing? Dual language acquisition can yield common influences that may be shared across different bilingual groups, as well as language-specific influences stemming from a given language pairing. To investigate these effects, we examined bilingual English…

Language experience shapes infants' abilities to process speech sounds, with universal phonetic discrimination abilities narrowing in the second half of the first year. Brain measures reveal a corresponding change in neural discrimination as the infant brain becomes selectively sensitive to its native language(s). Whether and how bilingual…

Many Latino children in the U.S. speak primarily Spanish at home with few opportunities for exposure to English before entering school. For monolingual children, the strongest early predictor of later school success is oral language skill developed before kindergarten. Less is known about how early oral language skills support later learning in…

Young children engage in essentialist reasoning about natural kinds, believing that many traits are innately determined. This study investigated whether personal experience with second language acquisition could alter children's essentialist biases. In a switched-at-birth paradigm, 5- and 6-year-old monolingual and simultaneous bilingual…