Differences in the Association between Segment and Language: Early Bilinguals Pattern with Monolinguals and Are Less Accurate than Late Bilinguals (original) (raw)
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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.
Spanish–English speech perception in children and adults: Developmental trends
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2013
This study explored the developmental trends and phonetic category formation in bilingual children and adults. Participants included 30 fluent Spanish-English bilingual children, aged 8-11, and bilingual adults, aged 18-40. All completed gating tasks that incorporated code-mixed Spanish-English stimuli. There were significant differences in performance according to phonotactic construction of the stimuli, with fastest word recognition on words with voiceless initial consonants. Analysis of developmental trends revealed significant differences in children's performance by grade level and fastest recognition on English voiceless initial consonants than Spanish voiceless initial consonants. Differences in voice onset time between English and Spanish may have contributed to quicker recognition of English voiceless consonants than Spanish voiceless consonants. It is also possible that increased exposure to both spoken and written English may account for faster recognition of English voiceless words than Spanish voiceless words. In conclusion, multiple factors may influence perception of a second language.
Languages, 2021
This study tests whether Australian English (AusE) and European Spanish (ES) listeners differ in their categorisation and discrimination of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) vowels. In particular, we investigate two theoretically relevant measures of vowel category overlap (acoustic vs. perceptual categorisation) as predictors of non-native discrimination difficulty. We also investigate whether the individual listener’s own native vowel productions predict non-native vowel perception better than group averages. The results showed comparable performance for AusE and ES participants in their perception of the BP vowels. In particular, discrimination patterns were largely dependent on contrast-specific learning scenarios, which were similar across AusE and ES. We also found that acoustic similarity between individuals’ own native productions and the BP stimuli were largely consistent with the participants’ patterns of non-native categorisation. Furthermore, the results indicated that both acou...
International Journal of Bilingualism, 2013
This study examines monolingual and multilingual individuals' discrimination of stop consonants in a language to which they had never been exposed: Korean. If bilingualism leads to increased flexibility in phonological categorization, we may see a broad-based bilingual advantage for phoneme discrimination. Using a Korean phoneme discrimination task, we compared 56 adults in four groups: monolingual English, bilingual Spanish, bilingual Armenian, and trilingual. Findings indicate that Spanish-English bilingual individuals scored no better than English monolinguals, and lower than Armenian-English bilingual individuals. In this case, the advantage from early childhood non-English exposure or current bilingualism was found to be specific only to languages with similar phonemic categories. This supports a narrow first/second language to third language transfer view of phoneme discrimination skills.
Two ways to listen: Do L2-dominant bilinguals perceive stop voicing according to language mode
Journal of Phonetics, 2012
How listeners categorize two phones predicts the success with which they will discriminate the given phonetic distinction. In the case of bilinguals, such perceptual patterns could reveal whether the listener's two phonological systems are integrated or separate. This is of particular interest when a given contrast is realized differently in each language, as is the case with Greek and English stop-voicing distinctions. We had Greek–English early sequential bilinguals and Greek and English monolinguals (baselines) categorize, rate, and discriminate stop-voicing contrasts in each language. All communication with each group of bilinguals occurred solely in one language mode, Greek or English. The monolingual groups showed the expected native-language constraints, each perceiving their native contrast more accurately than the opposing nonnative contrast. Bilinguals' category-goodness ratings for the same physical stimuli differed, consistent with their language mode, yet their discrimination performance was unaffected by language mode and biased toward their dominant language (English). We conclude that bilinguals integrate both languages in a common phonetic space that is swayed by their long-term dominant language environment for discrimination, but that they selectively attend to language-specific phonetic information for phonologically motivated judgments (category-goodness ratings).
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.
Preattentive language effects in bilinguals
The Journal of the …, 2011
Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 10) to test pre-attentive speech discrimination in two language contexts. ERPs were recorded while participants silently read magazines in English or Spanish. Two speech contrast conditions were recorded in each language context. In the phonemic in English condition, the speech sounds represented two different phonemic categories in English, but represented the same phonemic category in Spanish. In the phonemic in Spanish condition, the speech sounds represented two different phonemic categories in Spanish, but represented the same phonemic categories in English. Results showed pre-attentive discrimination when the acoustics/phonetics of the speech sounds match the language context (e.g., phonemic in English condition during the English language context). The results suggest that language contexts can affect pre-attentive auditory change detection. Specifically, bilinguals' mental processing of stop consonants relies on contextual linguistic information.
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2021
Bilinguals' observed perceptual shift across language contexts for shared acoustic properties between their languages supports the idea that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, develop two phonemic representations for the same acoustic property. This phenomenon is known as the double phonemic boundary. This investigation replicated previous findings of bilinguals' double phonemic boundary across a series of go/no-go tasks while controlling for known confounding effects in speech perception (i.e., contrast effects) and differences in resource allocation between bilinguals and monolinguals (i.e., left-hand or right-hand response). Using a range-base language cueing approach, we designed 2 experiments. The first experiment tested whether a voice onset time (VOT) range representative of either Spanish or English phonetic categories can cue bilinguals, but not monolinguals, to use language-specific perceptual routines. The second experiment tested a VOT range with a mixture of Spanish and English phonetic categories to determine whether directing attention to a specific phonetic category can disambiguate the competition of the nonattended category. The results for Experiment 1 showed that bilinguals can rely on the distributional patterns of their native phonetic categories to activate specific language modes. Experiment 2 showed that attention can change the weight given to a native phonetic distinction. However, this process is restricted by the internal phonetic composition of the native language(s).