Evidence for an Early Novelty Orientation in Bilingual Learners

Bilingual environments are more complex than monolingual environments. To adapt to this complexity, bilingual infants may navigate their environment in fundamentally different ways than monolingual infants. Drawing from visual, social, and linguistic processing, in this article, I present evidence to suggest that bilingual and monolingual learners demonstrate basic differences in the distribution of attention. Across these areas, bilingual learners appear to orient to novel information over familiar information, more so than monolingual learners. Attending more broadly within one's environment may support flexibility of learning within a complex environment, where underlying structure is harder to detect. However, broad exploration may also protract the process by which underlying structure is detected and learned. This may introduce developmental costs, such as delayed specialization in the native language observed in bilingual infants. In this way, bilingual infants may explore their surroundings in a manner distinct from monolingual infants that is both responsive to and adaptive for a relatively complex environment.

Automated summary

This article explores the impact of bilingual environments on infants' complexity and attention allocation patterns, finding that bilingual learners tend to focus on new information. Broadening attention in a complex environment may aid in flexible learning, but could also delay the process of learning underlying structures.