Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The language discrimination process in infants has been suc-cessfully modeled using i-vector based systems, with re-sults replicating several experimental findings. Still, recentwork found intriguing results regarding the difference betweenmonolingual and mixed-language exposure on language dis-crimination tasks. We use two carefully designed datasets,with an additional “bilingual” condition on the i-vector modelof language discrimination. Our results do not show any dif-ference in the ability of discriminating languages between thethree backgrounds, although we do replicate past observationsthat distant languages (English-Finnish) are easier to discrimi-nate than close languages (English-German). We do, however,find a strong effect of background when testing for the abilityof the learner to automatically sort sentences in language clus-ters: bilingual background being generally harder than mixedbackground (one speaker one language). Other analyses revealthat clustering is dominated by speakers information ratherthan by languages.