Is infant babbling altered by short term exposure to a second language?

In this study, we analyze the babbling of monolingual infants who have been exposed to Spanish in experimental settings for 30 minutes – 5 hours. Preliminary results show that with just 5 hours of exposure to Spanish, monolingual English learning infants are able to systematically alter their babbling when interacting with a Spanish versus an English interlocutor. In follow up studies, monolingual infants are being tested to determine if this result is an affect of direct imitation or learning, and bilingual infants are being tested to see if the trends in the data from infants with short term exposure mirror the babbling patterns of bilingual infants.

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