A limit on behavioral plasticity in speech perception

Pallier, Christophe; Bosch, Laura; Sebastián‐Gallés, Núria

doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(97)00030-9

Cited by 279 publications

(270 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…As the right panel in Figure 2 illustrates, regardless of bilinguals' L1, the response latency in discriminating the critical contrast was affected by the age bilinguals started learning Basque (β: 8.47, SE: 3.15, t: 2.69). Thus, our results converge with other findings that even early exposure to a language does not produce the same ability to distinguish a non-native phonemic contrast, compared to native discrimination (Bosch, Costa, & Sebastian-Galles, 2000;Flege & MacKay, 2004;Navarra et al, 2005;Pallier, Bosch, & Sebastian-Galles, 1997;Sebastian-Galles & Soto-Faraco, 1999). Our findings demonstrate that L2 AoA plays an important role in the discrimination of sounds at the phonetic-phonological level, with even very early and very proficient bilinguals showing a cost in discrimination latency.…”

Section: L1 and Aoa Effectssupporting

confidence: 92%

Listening to accented speech in a second language: First language and age of acquisition effects.

Larraza¹,

Samuel²,

Oñederra³

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Bilingual speakers must acquire the phonemic inventory of two languages and need to recognize spoken words cross-linguistically; a demanding job potentially made even more difficult due to dialectal variation, an intrinsic property of speech. The present work examines how bilinguals perceive second language (L2) accented speech and where accommodation to dialectal variation takes place. Dialectal effects were analyzed at different levels: An AXB discrimination task tapped phonetic-phonological representations, an auditory lexical decision task tested for effects in accessing the lexicon, and an auditory priming task looked for semantic processing effects. Within that central focus, the goal was to see whether perceptual adjustment at a given level is affected by two main linguistic factors: bilinguals' first language and age of acquisition of the L2. Taking advantage of the cross-linguistic situation of the Basque language, bilinguals with different first languages (Spanish or French) and ages of acquisition of Basque (simultaneous, early, or late) were tested. Our use of multiple tasks with multiple types of bilinguals demonstrates that in spite of very similar discrimination capacity, French-Basque versus Spanish-Basque simultaneous bilinguals' performance on lexical access significantly differed. Similarly, results of the early and late groups show that the mapping of phonetic-phonological information onto lexical representations is a more demanding process that accentuates non-native processing difficulties.L1 and AoA effects were more readily overcome in semantic processing; accented variants regularly created priming effects in the different groups of bilinguals.

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Section: L1 and Aoa Effectssupporting

confidence: 92%

Listening to accented speech in a second language: First language and age of acquisition effects.

Larraza¹,

Samuel²,

Oñederra³

2016

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…However, detrimental effects of age of acquisition have been noticed much before 10 years of age (e.g. Flege et al, 1995;Weber-Fox & Neville, 1996;Pallier, Bosch & Sebastian, 1997). According to some authors, there is a progressive decline in the ability to learn a language which can be noticed when exposure starts after age six (Long 1990;Pinker, 1994;but see Birdsong, 1999).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The loss of first language phonetic perception in adopted Koreans

Ventureyra

Pallier

Yoo

2004

Journal of Neurolinguistics

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“…0095}4470/99/030229#25 $30.00/0induce sensitivity to non-native contrasts. For instance, recent studies have shown that speakers who are functionally bilingual may not make complete perceptual distinctions in one of their languages * thus Spanish-native speakers of Catalan in Barcelona, despite being exposed to Catalan from early childhood, fail to make distinctions between certain Catalan sounds which are subsumed by a single Spanish phonetic category (Pallier, Bosch & SebastiaH n-GalleH s, 1997;SebastiaH n-GalleH s & Soto, 1999).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Otake & A. Cutler In this respect, the results that we have observed appear to stand in strong contrast to recent "ndings on phonetic processing from which the conclusion has been drawn that extensive exposure to a contrast is not su$cient to induce e!ective exploitation of that contrast in speech perception. The study of Pallier et al (1997), mentioned in the introduction, clearly showed that Spanish users of Catalan in Barcelona, despite being exposed to Catalan since early childhood, and indeed despite explicit schooling in Catalan, failed to discriminate certain phonetic contrasts which are distinctive in the Catalan phonetic inventory, but not in the inventory of Spanish. Similarly, SebastiaH nGalleH s and Soto (1999) showed that even Spanish-dominant Catalan}Spanish bilinguals who could successfully discriminate the Catalan contrasts nevertheless needed signi"-cantly longer fragments of gated stimuli to make the distinction than Catalan-dominant listeners did.…”

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confidence: 99%

Perception of suprasegmental structure in a non-native dialect

Otake

Cutler

1999

Journal of Phonetics

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Two experiments examined the processing of Tokyo Japanese pitchaccent distinctions by native speakers of Japanese from two accentlessvariety areas. In both experiments, listeners were presented with Tokyo Japanese speech materials used in an earlier study with Tokyo Japanese listeners, who clearly exploited the pitch-accent information in spokenword recognition. In the "rst experiment, listeners judged from which of two words, di!ering in accentual structure, isolated syllables had been extracted. Both new groups were, overall, as successful at this task as Tokyo Japanese speakers had been, but their response patterns di!ered from those of the Tokyo Japanese, for instance in that a bias towards H judgments in the Tokyo Japanese responses was weakened in the present groups' responses. In a second experiment, listeners heard word fragments and guessed what the words were; in this task, the speakers from accentless areas again performed signi"cantly above chance, but their responses showed less sensitivity to the information in the input, and greater bias towards vocabulary distribution frequencies, than had been observed with the Tokyo Japanese listeners. The results suggest that experience with a local accentless dialect a!ects the processing of accent for word recognition in Tokyo Japanese, even for listeners with extensive exposure to Tokyo Japanese.

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A limit on behavioral plasticity in speech perception

Cited by 279 publications

References 27 publications

Listening to accented speech in a second language: First language and age of acquisition effects.

Listening to accented speech in a second language: First language and age of acquisition effects.

The loss of first language phonetic perception in adopted Koreans

Perception of suprasegmental structure in a non-native dialect

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