A central problem in language acquisition is how children effortlessly acquire the grammar oftheir native language even though speech provides no direct information about underlyingstructure. This learning problem is even more challenging for dual language learners, yet bilingualinfants master their mother tongues as efficiently as monolinguals do. Here we ask howbilingual infants succeed, investigating the particularly challenging task of learning two languageswith conflicting word orders (English: eat an apple versus Japanese: ringo-wo taberu ‘apple.acceat’). We show that 7-month-old bilinguals use the characteristic prosodic cues (pitch andduration) associated with different word orders to solve this problem. Thus, the complexity ofbilingual acquisition is countered by bilinguals’ ability to exploit relevant cues. Moreover, thefinding that perceptually available cues like prosody can bootstrap grammatical structure adds toour understanding of how and why infants acquire grammar so early and effortlessly.
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