Spanish–English speech perception in children and adults: Developmental trends (original) (raw)
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Cross-Language Interference in the Phonological Awareness of Spanish-English Bilingual Children
2003
This study examines whether Spanish-English bilingual children's phonological awareness (PA) performance reflects specific contrasts between English and Spanish by focusing on children's segmentation of vowels treated as single units in English but as two units in Spanish (/eI/ and /aI/). The role of oral language proficiency, specifically vocabulary, in the phonological awareness of bilingual children is also explored. Bilingual kindergartners and first graders in English or Spanish literacy instruction and a comparison group of monolingual English-speaking peers were administered tests of expressive vocabulary in English and Spanish and a phonemic segmentation task in English. Bilingual children, particularly those with higher Spanish language proficiencies, tended to hypersegment long diphthongized vowels. English language proficiency predicted correct performance on English phonemic segmentation more powerfully for children with low Spanish language proficiency and for children in English literacy instruction. For Spanish-instructed children, Spanish language proficiency predicted English phonemic segmentation, suggesting cross-language transfer. (Contains 32 references.) (Author/SM) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
Speech Sound Acquisition in a 5-year-old Spanish-English Bilingual Child
Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, 2017
One of the most challenging aspects of assessing the phonological development of bilingual children is finding a method that is both ecologically valid and informative. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether spontaneous speech samples from an English-Spanish bilingual child give clinically relevant information through an analysis of phonological complexity. In this single subject case study, the researchers collect spontaneous speech samples from a 5-year-old, English-Spanish bilingual child. The speech samples are transcribed and evaluated to assess phonemic accuracy and levels of phonological complexity in both target languages. The results of this study indicate that spontaneous speech samples may be effective in evaluating speech sound complexity of production for bilingual children and add to previous studies that have shown similar findings.
Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics
This study examined speech discrimination of English vowels [ɑ] (as in "hot"), [ʌ] (as in "hut"), and [ae] (as in "hat") by non-native English speakers, using an AXB discrimination task. Previous research has shown that a person's first language (L1) influences how speech is perceived in a second-learned language (L2). Spanish and Japanese were chosen for this study because both languages share the same five spectrally-different vowels, but Japanese additionally distinguishes between short and long versions of those five vowels. The target populations were early and late Spanish-English bilinguals, early and late Japanese-English bilinguals, and monolingual American English controls. We predicted that 1) monolinguals and early bilinguals would show better performance than late bilinguals and 2) discrimination of the [ʌ] vs. [ae] contrast would be easier than [ʌ] vs. [ɑ] and [ɑ] vs. [ae]. The results supported our predictions; [ɑ] as the target was the hardest contrast for all groups. Our findings revealed that L1 spectral-temporal cues and L2 age of acquisition affect L2 speech perception.
Bilingual speech perception and learning: A review of recent trends
International Journal of Bilingualism, 2014
Over the past several years, the field of bilingual speech perception has seen a substantial increase in both the number of publications and in the amount of interest directed at its findings. Consequently, the time is ripe to assess the state of the field, what we have accomplished and where we have yet to go. Although we cannot capture the full state of the field in the space of this paper, we hope to summarize the major trends that have led to the current state and take stock of its future directions. To that end, we focus our review on the relative merits of single phonemes versus whole words and phrases when investigating bilingual speech, the efficacy of the different training paradigms that have been attempted and we focus, in particular, on the role of individual differences in predicting learning outcomes. We conclude our review by highlighting recent developments demonstrating that identifying individual differences in ability pre-training can result in more efficacious training paradigms. Goals for future research are also discussed.
Learning and Individual Differences, 2012
ABSTRACT The extent to which the phonetic system of a second language is mastered varies across individuals. The present study evaluates the pattern of individual differences in late bilinguals across different phonological processes. Fifty-five late Dutch-English bilinguals were tested on their ability to perceive a difficult L2 speech contrast (the English /æ/-/ε/ contrast) in three different tasks: A categorization task, a word identification task and a lexical decision task. As a group, L2 listeners were less accurate than native listeners. However, at the individual level, almost half of the L2 listeners scored within the native range in the categorization task whereas a small percentage scored within the native range in the identification and lexical decision tasks. These results show that L2 listeners' performance crucially depends on the nature of the task, with higher L2 listener accuracy on an acoustic-phonetic analysis task than on tasks involving lexical processes. These findings parallel previous results for early bilinguals, where the pattern of performance was consistent with the processing hierarchy proposed by different models of speech perception. The results indicate that the analysis of patterns of non-native performance can provide important insights concerning the architecture of the speech perception system and the issue of language learnability.
Early bilingual acquisition of the voicing contrast in English and Spanish
Journal of Phonetics, 1996
A case study of a child acquiring English and Spanish in England between the ages of 1 ; 7 and 2 ; 3 is presented. VOT measurements of utterance-initial stops in English and Spanish were made of productions at ages 1 ; 7 , 1 ; 11 , and 2 ; 3. Similar measurements of the parents' Spanish speech were made. While the child had developed an adult-like voicing contrast in English by age 2 ; 3 , she had not done so in Spanish. However , there were signs of a contrast developing in Spanish , based on small lag dif ferences. Similar lag dif ferences were found in the input. The results are accounted for in terms of the relatively greater acoustic salience of the lag dif ferences in English compared with those in Spanish .
Dominance, mode, and individual variation in bilingual speech production and perception
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 2019
Early Spanish-English bilinguals and English controls were tested on the production and perception of negative, short-lag, and long-lag Voice Onset Time (VOT), VOT types spanning the Spanish and English phonetic categories: phonologically, negative and short-lag VOT stops are distinct phonemes in Spanish, but realizations of voiced stops in English. Dominance was critical: more English-dominant bilinguals produced more short-lag VOT stops in response to negative VOT stimuli, and were also less accurate than more balanced bilinguals at discriminating negative from short-lag VOT. Bilinguals performed similarly to monolinguals overall, but they produced more negative VOT tokens and shorter short-lag VOT in response to negative VOT. Their productions were also less well correlated with perception and showed more variation between individuals. These results highlight the variable nature of bilingual production and perception, and demonstrate the need to consider language dominance, indiv...
Second Language Research
Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in esport for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. spi instead of espi was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this contrast in second language (L2) speech of Spanish–English sequential bilinguals. A same–different discrimination task in stimulus pairs such as spi–espi assessed speech perception and a phonemic verbal fluency task elicited speech production. Logistic mixed model regressions revealed significant differences in accuracy between the bilinguals and the English monolinguals, although some bilinguals performed within the monolingual range. For the production task, but not for the perception task, bilinguals with more exposure to English and greater grammatical knowledge of English performed significantly more accurately than those with less exposure and lower grammatical knowledge. Ther...
Second Language Research, 2019
Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in esport for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. spi instead of espi was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this contrast in second language (L2) speech of Spanish-English sequential bilinguals. A same-different discrimination task in stimulus pairs such as spi-espi assessed speech perception and a phonemic verbal fluency task elicited speech production. Logistic mixed model regressions revealed significant differences in accuracy between the bilinguals and the English monolinguals, although some bilinguals performed within the monolingual range. For the production task, but not for the perception task, bilinguals with more exposure to English and greater grammatical