Mono- and multilingual toddlers' sensitivity to correct and incorrect pronunciations of familiar words and its link to later language skills.

The current study explores whether monolingual (n = 32, 17 girls, 15 boys) and multilingual (n = 23, 12 boys, 11 girls) toddlers in French-speaking Switzerland are able to recognize correct pronunciations and detect subtle mispronunciations of familiar words, and whether these early skills are connected to later language abilities. In a looking-while-listening eye-tracking paradigm at 20 months of age, both monolingual and multilingual participants showed significantly higher looking time increases (medium effect size) for pictures of familiar objects (e.g., a foot) when the object was labeled correctly (e.g., pied [pje] "foot") than when it was mispronounced (here, vied [vje]). Notably, processing of correct labels and mispronunciations was moderately correlated with nonword repetition skills, but not vocabulary size, at 36 months, highlighting the predictive value of word recognition tasks for phonological processing.