This research examines the maturation of I-E vowel discrimination, in terms of neurophysiological responses, in infants exposed monolingually to English or bilingually to English and Spanish. The vowels [I] as in "pit" and [E] as in "pet" contrast meaning in English but not in Spanish.  Bilingual exposure to English and Spanish alters the distribution of phonetic information heard by an infant and may alter the timecourse of vowel category development in the two languages (e.g., Bosch & Sebastian-Galles, 2003).  The goal of the current study is to examine whether there is evidence from brain responses indicating differences in the development of this English vowel category as a function of amount of English versus Spanish in the input.  Preliminary result reveal that both monolingually- and bilingually-exposed infants and children show evidence of good discrimination of the English vowels, but that the groups with bilingual exposure more often show increased contribution of the right hemisphere to discrimination compared to the groups receiving monolingual exposure.  It is not currently clear why these hemispheric differences are found, but they may be related to differences in how attention is allocated in processing the vowels.

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