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Many studies have shown that input in more than one language influences children's phonemic development. In this study, we examined the neural processes supporting perception of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in bilingual Italian-German children and their monolingual German peers. While German contrasts short-lag and long-lag, Italian contrasts short-lag and voicing lead. We examined whether bilinguals' phonetic/phonological systems for the two languages develop independently or whether they influence each other, and what role language input plays in the formation of phonetic/phonological categories. Forty five-year-old children (16 monolingual German, 24 bilingual Italian-German) were tested in an oddball design expected to elicit a neural Mismatch Response (MMR). The stimuli were bilabial stop VOT contrasts with the short-lag stop, common to both languages, as the standard. Four deviant VOTs were selected: 92 ms and 36 ms lag for German; 112 ms and 36 ms voicing lead for Italian. Bilingual children's language background was assessed using a caregiver questionnaire. Italian-German bilingual 5-year-old children and German monolingual controls showed similar MMRs to German long-lag and Italian voicing lead VOT, except for the 36 ms long-lag deviant; this acoustically difficult distinction did not elicit a robust negative MMR in the bilingual children. The lack of a difference between the bilinguals and monolinguals for voicing lead suggests that the amount of input in Italian for the bilinguals was not sufficient to lead to an advantage compared to the monolingual German children. Alternatively, the finding could indicate that voicing lead is easier to discriminate than voicing lag., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Bloder et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

In bi- and monolingual children, nonword repetition tasks (NWRTs) differentiate typically developing (TD) children from children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or children with a risk of DLD. Previous research has highlighted the importance of considering language specificity in nonword (NW) construction especially for bilingual children. A novel NWRT has been designed for the screening of DLD risk in the bilingual Italian-German preschool population, creating lists of language-specific (for the two target languages) and language-non-specific NWs. This study aimed to test the discriminative validity of this NWRT and to identify the characteristics of the NWs that maximise discriminative validity within language-specific and language-non-specific subsets. The findings confirm the role of language specificity (in terms of target language alikeness) but also of other characteristics related to word structure complexity.