Bilingual beginnings as a lens for theory development: PRIMIR in focus

PRIMIR (Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Interactive Representations; Curtin and Werker, 2007 and Werker and Curtin, 2005) is a framework that encompasses the bidirectional relations between infant speech perception and the emergence of the lexicon. Here, we expand its mandate by considering infants growing up bilingual. We argue that, just like monolinguals, bilingual infants have access to rich information in the speech stream and by the end of their first year, they establish not only language-specific phonetic category representations, but also encode and represent both sub-phonetic and indexical detail. Perceptual biases, developmental level, and task demands work together to influence the level of detail used in any particular situation. In considering bilingual acquisition, we more fully elucidate what is meant by task demands, now understood both in terms of external demands imposed by the language situation, and internal demands imposed by the infant (e.g. different approaches to the same apparent task taken by infants from different backgrounds). In addition to the statistical learning mechanism previously described in PRIMIR, the necessity of a comparison–contrast mechanism is discussed. This refocusing of PRIMIR in the light of bilinguals more fully explicates the relationship between speech perception and word learning in all infants.

Research highlights► The PRIMIR theoretical framework is extended to infants growing up bilingual. ► Refocusing PRIMIR in light of bilinguals further explicates the relationship between speech perception and word learning. ► A mechanism for comparing and contrasting information is added to the framework. ► A distinction is made between internal and external task demands. ► This expansion of PRIMIR helps to explain the behavior of infants growing up in a wide variety of language backgrounds.