
Krista Byers-HeinleinConcordia University · Department of Psychology
Krista Byers-Heinlein
Ph.D.
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157
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
July 2010 - March 2016
September 2004 - May 2010
Education
September 2006 - May 2010
September 2004 - August 2006
September 1999 - May 2003
Publications
Publications (157)
Young children engage in essentialist reasoning about natural kinds, believing that many traits are innately determined. This study investigated whether personal experience with second language acquisition could alter children’s essentialist biases. In a switched-at-birth paradigm, five- and six-year-old monolingual and simultaneous bilingual child...
Is parental language mixing related to vocabulary acquisition in bilingual infants and children? Bilingual parents (who spoke English and another language; n = 181) completed the Language Mixing Scale questionnaire, a new self-report measure that assesses how frequently parents use words from two different languages in the same sentence, such as bo...
a b s t r a c t PRIMIR (Processing Rich Information from Multidimensional Interactive Representations; Curtin & Werker, 2007; Werker & 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. W...
The first steps toward bilingual language acquisition have already begun at birth. When tested on their preference for English versus Tagalog, newborns whose mothers spoke only English during pregnancy showed a robust preference for English. In contrast, newborns whose mothers spoke both English and Tagalog regularly during pregnancy showed equal p...
Many children grow up in bilingual families and acquire two first languages. Emerging research is advancing the view that the capacity to acquire language can be applied equally to two languages as to one but that bilingual and monolingual acquisition nonetheless differ in some nontrivial ways. To probe the first steps toward acquisition, researche...
The remarkable human capacity for bilingual and multilingual acquisition raises fundamental questions about how the brain develops efficient systems for processing multiple languages. In this study, we used neural network models trained on natural speech input to examine how these efficient representations emerge. Our models show that phonological...
Assessing early vocabulary development commonly involves parent report methods and behavioral tasks like looking‐while‐listening. While both yield reliable aggregate scores, findings are mixed regarding their reliability in measuring infants' knowledge of individual words. Using archival data from 126 monolingual and bilingual 14–31‐month‐olds, we...
Big team science has the potential to reshape comparative cognition research, but its implementation — especially in making fair comparisons between species, handling multisite variation and reaching researcher consensus — poses daunting challenges. Here, we propose solutions and discuss how big team science can transform the field.
Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...
Cocktail party environments require listeners to tune in to a target voice while ignoring surrounding speakers. This presents unique challenges for bilingual listeners who have familiarity with several languages. Our study recruited English-French bilinguals to listen to a male target speaking French or English, masked by two female voices speaking...
Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...
Language exposure is an important determiner of language outcomes in bilingual children. Family language strategies (FLS, e.g., one‐parent‐one‐language) were contrasted with parents’ individual language use to predict language exposure in 4–31‐month‐old children (50% female) living in Montreal, Quebec. Two‐hundred twenty one children (primarily Eur...
From early on, infants show a preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS), and exposure to IDS has been correlated with language outcome measures such as vocabulary. The present multi-laboratory study explores this issue by investigating whether there is a link between early preference for IDS and later vocabulary s...
Previous research suggests that monolingual children learn words more readily in contexts with referential continuity (i.e., repeated labeling of the same referent) than in contexts with referential discontinuity (i.e., referent switches). Here, we extended this work, testing monolingual and bilingual (N = 64) 3- and 4-year-olds’ novel word learnin...
Do toddlers and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests they do. But a growing body of failed replication studies raised questions about the paradigm’s suitability, urging the need to test the robustness of AL as a spontaneous measure of ToM. In a multi-lab collaboration we examine...
Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: Accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurtlike pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive cha...
Big Team Science (BTS) offers immense potential for comparative cognition research, enabling larger and more diverse sample sizes, promoting open science practices, and fostering global collaboration. However, implementing BTS in comparative cognition also presents unique challenges, such as making comparisons “species fair,” dealing with multi-sit...
There is substantial evidence that infants prefer infant-directed speech (IDS) to adult-directed speech (ADS). The strongest evidence for this claim has come from two large-scale investigations: i) a community-augmented meta-analysis of published behavioral studies and ii) a large-scale multi-lab replication study. In this paper, we aim to improve...
Assessing early vocabulary development commonly involves methods like parent report and behavioral tasks like looking-while-listening. While both yield reliable aggregate scores, findings are mixed regarding their reliability in measuring infants' knowledge of individual words. Using archival data from 126 monolingual and bilingual 14–31-month-olds...
Family language policies encompass three components: language beliefs, language practices, and language management. This study focuses on language beliefs, which we approach from an attitudes perspective, presenting a corpus-assisted discourse study of parental attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. Based on corpora (over 30,000 words) compri...
Bilinguals need to learn two words for most concepts. These words are called translation equivalents, and those that also sound similar (e.g., banana– banane ) are called cognates. Research has consistently shown that children and adults process and name cognates more easily than non-cognates. The present study explored if there is such an advantag...
Vocabulary size is a crucial early indicator of language development, for both monolingual and bilingual children. Assessing vocabulary in bilingual children is complex because they learn words in two languages, and there remains significant controversy about how to best measure their vocabulary size, especially in relation to monolinguals. This st...
Language exposure is a determiner of language outcomes in bilingual children. The predictiveness of family language strategies versus parents’ individual language use on language exposure was contrasted in children aged 4-31 months (50% female) living in Montreal (mostly mid-high SES, European ethnicity). 221 were learning two community languages (...
Comparative cognition research investigates the evolutionary background and functions of cognitive skills that enable individuals and species to adapt to and act in their environment. Traditionally, research in this field has been confined to isolated facilities and individual research teams focusing on one or just a handful of species. While this...
Individuals with ADHD and bilinguals have each widely been considered vulnerable to vocabulary deficits compared to their peers. However, the interaction of ADHD and bilingualism in affecting vocabulary in both languages has yet to be studied. We tested whether a 'double disadvantage' exists for bilinguals with ADHD by measuring the vocabularies of...
There is substantial evidence that infants prefer infant-directed speech (IDS) to adult-directed speech (ADS). The strongest evidence for this claim has come from two large-scale investigations: i) a community-augmented meta-analysis of published behavioral studies and ii) a large-scale multi-lab replication study. In this paper, we aim to improve...
Sometime before their second birthday, many children have a period of rapid expressive vocabulary growth called the vocabulary spurt. Theories of the underlying mechanisms differ: accumulator models emphasize the accumulation of experience with words over time to yield a spurt-like pattern, while cognitive models attribute the spurt to cognitive ch...
Children have an early ability to learn and comprehend words, a skill that develops as they age. A critical question remains regarding what drives this development. Maturation-based theories emphasise cognitive maturity as a driver of comprehension, while accumulator theories emphasise children's accumulation of language experience over time. In th...
Language switching is common in bilingual environments, including those of many bilingual children. Some bilingual children hear rapid switching that involves immediate translation of words (an “immediate-translation” pattern), while others hear their languages most often in long blocks of a single language (a “one-language-at-a-time” pattern). Our...
Family language strategies are approaches that parents adopt for language use with their multilingual children. In bilingual contexts, these strategies influence children’s language exposure and development (Macleod et al., 2022). In the more complex context of trilingualism, how families settle on strategies and their relationship with exposure ma...
The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of big team science (BTS), endeavours where a comparatively large number of researchers pool their intellectual and/or material resources in pursuit of a common goal. Despite this burgeoning interest, there exists little guidance on how to create, manage and participate in these collaborations. In this...
Language mixing is a common feature of many bilingually-raised children's input. Yet how it is related to their language development remains an open question. The current study investigated mixed-language input indexed by observed (30-second segment) counts and proportions in day-long recordings as well as parent-reported scores, in relation to inf...
Many parents express concerns for their children’s multilingual development, yet little is known about the nature and strength of these concerns – especially among parents in multilingual societies. This pre-registered, questionnaire-based study addresses this gap by examining the concerns of 821 Quebec-based parents raising infants and toddlers ag...
The past decade has witnessed a proliferation of Big Team Science (BTS), endeavours where a comparatively large number of researchers pool their intellectual and/or material resources in pursuit of a common goal. Despite this burgeoning interest, there exists little guidance on how to create, manage, and participate in these collaborations. In this...
Bilingual infants acquire languages in a variety of language environments. Some caregivers follow a one‐person‐one‐language approach in an attempt to not “confuse” their child. However, the central assumption that infants can keep track of what language a person speaks has not been tested. In two studies, we tested whether bilingual and monolingual...
Much of our basic understanding of cognitive and social processes in infancy relies on measures of looking time, and specifically on infants’ visual preference for a novel or familiar stimulus. However, despite being the foundation of many behavioral tasks in infant research, the determinants of infants’ visual preferences are poorly understood, an...
The scientific community has long recognized the benefits of open science. Today, governments and research agencies worldwide are increasingly promoting and mandating open practices for scientific research. However, for open science to become the by-default model for scientific research, researchers must perceive open practices as accessible and ac...
This pre-print presents a study of 24 French-English bilingual parents reading books of different formats (single-language in the parent's dominant language, single-language in the parent's non-dominant language or bilingual) to their pre-school-aged children. We analyzed parents' reading interactions in terms of quantity (number of words) and qual...
Young bilinguals need to learn words in both their languages while navigating two sets of speech sounds. Evidence is mixed as to whether this impacts their encoding of fine phonological detail in words. We used a mispronunciation paradigm to test bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ encoding of phonological detail, using cognate (e.g. banana - banane) and...
Many parents have concerns about raising their children multilingually. However, our understanding of these concerns is limited and comes mainly from studies in societies where monolingualism is the norm. The concerns of parents raising children in multilingual societies may differ. We address this gap with a corpus-assisted discourse study of pare...
Language switching is common in bilingual environments, including those of many bilingual children. Some bilingual children hear rapid switching that involves immediate translation of words (an ‘immediate-translation’ pattern), while others hear their languages most often in long blocks of a single language (a ‘one-language-at-a-time’ pattern). Our...
The acquisition of translation equivalents is often considered a special component of bilingual children's vocabulary development, as bilinguals have to learn words that share the same meaning across their two languages. This study examined three contrasting accounts for bilingual children's acquisition of translation equivalents relative to single...
Bilingualism has been hypothesized to shape cognitive abilities across the lifespan. Here, we examined the replicability of a seminal study that showed monolingual–bilingual differences in infancy (Kovács & Mehler, 2009a) by collecting new data from 7-month-olds and 20-month-olds and reanalyzing three open datasets from 7- to 9-month-olds (D’Souza...
Bilingual infants acquire languages in a variety of language environments. Some caregivers follow a one-person-one-language approach in an attempt to not ‘confuse’ their child. However, the central assumption that infants can keep track of what language a person speaks has not been tested. In two studies, we tested whether bilingual and monolingual...
Children have an early ability to learn and comprehend words, a skill that develops as they age. A critical question remains regarding what drives this development. Maturation-based theories emphasize cognitive maturity as a driver of comprehension, while accumulator theories emphasize children’s accumulation of language experiences over time. In t...
The scientific community has long recognized the benefits of open science. Today, governments and research agencies worldwide are increasingly promoting and mandating open practices for scientific research. However, for open science to become the by-default model for scientific research, researchers must perceive open practices as accessible and ac...
In this study, we used 2016 Canadian Census data to examine home bilingualism among children aged 0–9 years. Across Canada, 18 percent of children used at least two languages at home, which rose to more than 25 percent in large cities and the Canadian territories. English and French was the most common language pair in Quebec and Ontario, and vario...
Phoneme perception varies across languages, as listeners of different languages use the same phonetic cues differently to determine which phoneme they are hearing. This raises the question of how bilinguals perceive phonemes in each of their languages. Previous research has found that bilinguals are able to perceive phonemes in a language-specific...
Bilingualism is hard to define, measure, and study. Sparked by the “replication crisis” in the social sciences, a recent discussion on the advantages of open science is gaining momentum. Here, we join this debate to argue that bilingualism research would greatly benefit from embracing open science. We do so in a unique way, by presenting six fictio...
Parents raising children multilingually have expressed concerns for their children's multilingual development, but little is known about the nature and strength of those concerns. This large-scale quantitative study examines the concerns of 821 parents raising infants and toddlers multilingually in Quebec, Canada. The results revealed that parents...
Bilingual infants grow up with the unique experience of needing to learn two words for most concepts. These words are called translation equivalents, and translation equivalents that also sound similar (e.g., banana—banane) are called cognates. Research has consistently shown that children and adults process and name cognates more easily than non-c...
Gesture is an important communication tool that provides insight into infants' early language and cognitive development and predicts later language skills. While bilingual school‐age children have been reported to gesture more than monolinguals, there is a lack of research examining gesture use in infants exposed to more than one language. In this...
This is the first large-scale study of resources as a form of language management – that is, a way of influencing children’s language practices. We introduce the distinction between child-directed resources (i.e., those providing parents with opportunities to engage with their children in the languages they are transmitting) and parent-directed res...
This is the first large-scale study of resources as a form of language management – that is, a way of influencing children’s language practices. We introduce the distinction between child-directed resources (i.e. those providing parents with opportunities to engage with their children in the languages they are transmitting) and parent-directed reso...
Many infants and children around the world grow up exposed to two or more languages. Their success in learning each of their languages is a direct consequence of the quantity and quality of their everyday language experience, including at home, in daycare and preschools, and in the broader community context. Here, we discuss how research on early l...
This is the first large-scale, quantitative study of the evaluative dimensions and potential predictors of Quebec-based parents’ attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. Such attitudes are assumed to constitute a determinant of parental language choices, and thereby influence children's multilingual development. The newly-developed Attitudes to...
Yarkoni's analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to di...
Reading stories to children provides opportunities for word learning. Bilingual children, however, encounter new words in each of their languages during shared storybook reading, and the way in which these words are presented can vary. We compared learning from two types of bilingual book materials: single‐language books and bilingual books. Five‐y...
Many infants and children around the world grow up exposed to two or more languages. Their success in learning each of their languages is a direct consequence of the quantity and quality of their everyday language experience, including at home, in daycare and preschools, and in the broader community context. Here, we discuss how research on early l...
This is the first large-scale, quantitative study of the evaluative dimensions and potential predictors of Quebec-based parents’ attitudes towards childhood multilingualism. Such attitudes are assumed to constitute a determinant of parental language choices, and thereby influence children’s multilingual development. The newly-developed Attitudes to...
The ability to differentiate between two languages sets the stage for bilingual learning. Infants can discriminate languages when hearing long passages, but language switches often occur on short time scales with few cues to language identity. As bilingual infants begin learning sequences of sounds and words, how do they detect the dynamics of two...
Bilingual children hear sentences that contain words from both languages, also known as code-switching. Investigating how bilinguals process code-switching is a crucial component in understanding bilingual language acquisition, because young bilinguals experience processing costs and reduced comprehension when encountering code-switched nouns. Stud...
Bilingualism is hard to define, measure, and study. Sparked by the so-called replication crisis in the social sciences, a recent discussion on the advantages of open science is gaining momentum. Here we join this debate to argue that bilingualism research would greatly benefit from embracing open science. We do so in a unique way, by presenting six...
Language mixing is common in bilingual children's learning environments. Here, we investigated effects of language mixing on children's learning of new words. We tested two groups of 3-year-old bilinguals: French–English (Experiment 1) and Spanish–English (Experiment 2). Children were taught two novel words, one in single-language sentences (“Look!...
Bilinguals understand when the communication context calls for speaking a particular language and can switch from speaking one language to the other based on such conceptual knowledge. There is disagreement regarding whether conceptually-based language switching is also possible in the listening modality. For example, can bilingual listeners percep...
This study used the 2016 Canadian census data to examine bilingualism amongst children aged 0–9 years. Across Canada, 18 percent of children used two or more languages at home, which rose to more than 25 percent of children in large cities and in Northern Canada. English and French was the most common language pair in Quebec and Ontario, and a vari...
Learning the rules and expectations that govern our social interactions is one of the major challenges of development. The current study examined whether bilingualism is associated with differences in children’s developing social knowledge. We presented 54 4- to 6-year-old monolingual and bilingual children with vignettes of moral transgressions (e...
Aims and Objectives:
Bilingualism is a complex construct, and it can be difficult to define and model. This paper proposes that the field of bilingualism can draw from other fields of psychology, by integrating advanced psychometric models that incorporate both categorical and continuous properties. These models can unify the widespread use of bili...
The ability to learn and apply rules lies at the heart of cognition. In a seminal study, Marcus, Vijayan, Rao, and Vishton (1999) reported that seven-month-old infants learned abstract rules over syllable sequences and were able to generalize those rules to novel syllable sequences. Dozens of studies have since extended on that research using diffe...
Evaluating others’ actions as praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental aspect of human nature. A seminal study published in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life, considerably earlier than previously thought (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). In this study,...
The acquisition of translation equivalents is often considered a special component of bilingual children’s vocabulary development, as bilinguals have to learn words that share the same meaning across their two languages. This study examined three contrasting accounts for bilingual children’s acquisition of translation equivalents relative to words...
Code-switching is a common phenomenon in bilingual communities, but little is known about bilingual parents’ code-switching when speaking to their infants. In a pre-registered study, we identified instances of code-switching in day-long at-home audio recordings of 21 French–English bilingual families in Montreal, Canada, who provided recordings whe...
The adult lexicon links concepts and labels with related meanings (e.g. dog–cat). How do children’s encounters with concepts versus labels contribute to semantic development? Three studies investigated semantic priming in 40 monolinguals and 32 bilinguals, who have similar experience with concepts, but different experience with labels (i.e. monolin...
Infants and toddlers grow up in a variety of language environments—for example, some are monolingual and some are bilingual—but nearly all children develop the ability to understand the language(s) around them. In this chapter, we trace children's path to language comprehension, from listening in infancy, to phonetic perception, speech segmentation...
Previous research suggests that English monolingual children and adults can use speech disfluencies (e.g., uh) to predict that a speaker will name a novel object. To understand the origins of this ability, we tested 48 32-month-old children (monolingual English, monolingual French, bilingual English-French; Study 1) and 16 adults (bilingual English...
Infants can learn words in their daily interactions early in life, and many studies have demonstrated that they can also learn words from brief in-lab exposures. While most studies have included monolingual infants, less is known about bilingual infants’ word learning and the role that language familiarity plays in this ability. In this study we ex...
Infant research is often underpowered, undermining the robustness and replicability of our findings. Improving the reliability of infant measures offers a solution for increasing statistical power independent of sample size. Here, we discuss two senses of the term reliability in the context of infant research: reliable (large) effects and reliable...
Yarkoni’s analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to di...
From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) compared with adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multisite study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to...
Do children and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Accumulating evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests that they do. But a growing body of studies failed to replicate these original findings. This paper presents the first step of a large-scale multi-lab collaboration dedicated to testing the robustness of spontaneo...
Many children grow up hearing multiple languages, learning words in each. How does the number of languages being learned affect multilinguals’ vocabulary development? In a pre-registered study, we compared productive vocabularies of bilingual ( n = 170) and trilingual ( n = 20) toddlers aged 17–33 months growing up in a bilingual community where bo...
Determining the meanings of words requires language learners to attend to what other people say. However, it behooves a young language learner to simultaneously encode relevant non‐verbal cues, for example, by following the direction of their eye gaze. Sensitivity to cues such as eye gaze might be particularly important for bilingual infants, as th...
Bilingualism has been hypothesized to shape domain-general cognitive abilities across the lifespan, in what some have called the “bilingual advantage”. Here, we examined the replicability of a seminal study that showed monolingual–bilingual differences in infancy (Kovács & Mehler, 2009a) by collecting new data from 7-month-olds and 20-month-olds an...
Vocabulary size is one of the most important early metrics of language development. Assessing vocabulary in bilingual children is complex because bilinguals learn words in two languages, which include translation equivalents (cross-language synonyms). We collected expressive vocabulary data from English and French monolinguals (n = 220), and Englis...
Aims and objectives
Many children grow up in bilingual families; however, little is known about how these families use their two languages in their home reading practices. The goal of this study was to examine the effect of language proficiency on the shared storybook reading practices of bilingual families.
Methodology
We gathered questionnaire d...