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Bilingualism research has primarily focused on the perception and processing of individual sounds or word learning. Many studies have investigated how bilingual listeners perceive sound contrasts that don't create lexical distinctions in their native language. There is substantially less research that has investigated how word-level properties impact L2 auditory processing. The present study examines how auditory lexical processing differs between monolingual and bilingual listeners with different language backgrounds. We collected lexical decision accuracies and latencies for 26,793 words and 9600 pseudowords from the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision database from native and non-native listener responses. We compare the language backgrounds of our 1028 listeners and group them into four groups: native speakers, early, early-late, and late bilinguals. We report the findings of an analysis investigating how language background and proficiency modulate lexical effects to understand how language background influences spoken word recognition. We find differences in the effects of lexical frequency, phonological neighborhood density, and phonological uniqueness point between the different listener groups. We discuss the impact of bilingualism in a word recognition task and how these results inform models of spoken word recognition and second language acquisition.

The influence of lexical factors on speech production has not yet been investigated in Spanish to the same extent as for other languages such as English, French, Dutch, and German. Addressing this literature gap, the present study investigates how word frequency, predictability, and lexical class affect the duration and first two formant values of tonic monophthong vowels (hereafter vowels) produced by monolingual Spanish speakers from Madrid using the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish [Torreira and Ernestus, LREC'10 (2010), pp. 2981–2985]. A tonic vowel is defined as the most prominent vowel in a word's citation form. Word frequency and predictability based on the preceding word were calculated using the Spanish data from the OpenSubtitle corpus [Lison and Tiedemann, LREC'16 (2016), pp. 923–929]. Results of statistical modelling showed that the three aspects of vowel production under study were affected by all the examined lexical characteristics, although the effect sizes were small. Results are discussed in the context of previous work on Spanish vowels and cross-linguistic trends in speech production.