Crosslinguistic differences in cue primacy affect bilinguals' discrimination performance

Abstract

Onset f0 – pitch at the onset of the vowel following the consonant – is an important cue to laryngeal stop distinctions in Korean, especially the lenis-aspirated contrast, while in English onset f0 plays only a secondary role in distinguishing voiced and voiceless stops. The current study investigates to what extent Korean heritage speakers (n = 29) who are English dominant can perceptually discriminate Korean lenis and aspirated stops differing acoustically only in terms of onset f0, but not in terms of VOT. Heritage speakers’ performance is compared to that of Korean-immersed native speakers as a control group (n = 29). We hypothesized that heritage speakers would experience more difficulty than Korean-immersed speakers in using onset f0 as the sole cue to laryngeal contrast, due to the influence from English, where VOT dominates onset f0 as a cue to voicing. The results of a mixed-effects logistic regression model confirmed that heritage speakers were less accurate in the lenis-aspirated discrimination task than Korean-immersed speakers, providing support to the hypothesis that bilinguals’ perception of their first language speech can be subject to crosslinguistic influence from their second language.