Language learning is influenced by both neural development and environmental experiences. This work investigates the influence of early bilingual experience on the neural mechanisms underlying speech processing in 4-month-old infants. We study how an early environmental factor such as bilingualism interacts with neural development by comparing…

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…

In this work we ask whether at birth, the human brain responds uniquely to speech, or if similar activation also occurs to a non-speech surrogate 'language'. We compare neural activation in newborn infants to the language heard "in utero" (English), to an unfamiliar language (Spanish), and to a whistled surrogate language (Silbo Gomero)…

The goal of the present study was to examine differences in cortical thickness, cortical surface area, and subcortical volume between bilingual children who are highly proficient in two languages (i.e., English and Spanish) and bilingual children who are mainly proficient in one of the languages (i.e., Spanish). All children (N = 49) learned…

Language experience "narrows" speech perception by the end of infants' first year, reducing discrimination of non-native phoneme contrasts while improving native-contrast discrimination. Previous research showed that declines in non-native discrimination were reversed by second-language experience provided at 9-10 months, but it is not known…