L2 effects on the perception and production of a native vowel contrast in early bilinguals

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of L2 (Spanish) use on Catalan–Spanish bilinguals’ ability to accurately perceive and produce two contrastive native Catalan vowel categories, /e/ and /ε/. Participants were L1 Catalan highly proficient Catalan–Spanish bilinguals differing in amount of daily exposure/use of Catalan (low: 40%–70% vs. high: 80%–100%). Perceptual accuracy was assessed through speeded categorization and AXB discrimination tasks based on a 10-step vowel continuum (/e/–/ε/). Production accuracy was assessed by eliciting /ε/ tokens in Catalan cognate and noncognate words. The results indicated that participants using Spanish more frequently discriminated Catalan vowels /e/ and /ε/ less accurately and significantly more slowly and had a more Spanish-like acoustic target in the production of Catalan /ε/, particularly in cognate words. These results are consistent with the view that, in a language contact context, extensive L2 experience affects L1 sound categories.

The influence of native-language tones on lexical access in the second language

“…For bilingual speakers, experience distinguishing words based on acoustic features in one language can result in changes to how that feature is perceived or learned in another language (Dupoux et al, 2010;Mora and Nadeu, 2012). For instance, L1 speakers of Catalan who have extensive L2 Spanish experience are less accurate at distinguishing /e/ and /E/, a phonetic contrast that is important for Catalan, but which does not exist in Spanish (Broersma and Cutler, 2008).…”

“…For instance, L1 speakers of Catalan who have extensive L2 Spanish experience are less accurate at distinguishing /e/ and /E/, a phonetic contrast that is important for Catalan, but which does not exist in Spanish (Broersma and Cutler, 2008). Furthermore, differences in the ability to perceive phonetic distinctions that are driven by experience with multiple languages, as in the Catalan-Spanish example, can impact listeners' ability to recognize or discriminate lexical items (Broersma and Cutler, 2008;Cutler et al, 2006;Mora and Nadeu, 2012;Pallier et al, 2001). Japanese-English bilinguals, for example, show evidence of lexical competition from "locker" when hearing the word "rocker" (Cutler et al, 2006).…”

Discriminação fonêmica na aquisição de segunda lingua em adulto - estudo de caso

“…This ability starts to decline around at six months because the perceptual system of the baby tunes with the linguistic input 4 . For a child in L1 acquisition, the phonemic discrimination occurs naturally, not passive and dependent on exposure to complex linguistic stimuli.…”

“…Study suggests that the use of L1 affects the perception and the production of sounds beyond the initial stages of second language acquisition (L2) 4 . It is not known what is the ideal age to start learning a L2, but there is a consensus on the greater success of the learner regarding the longer exposure and the greater linguistic experience with L2 4,5 . Few L2 learners come to acquire the target language with native domain or with the same competence than in L1 [5][6][7] .…”

Patterns of Short-Term Phonetic Interference in Bilingual Speech

“…The influence of the cognate status on bilinguals' phonetic implementation of words has also been observed in experiments using non-switching, single-language production tasks (Brown and Amengual 2015;Mora and Nadeu 2012). In one proposal (Amengual 2012), cognate phonetic effects were accounted for by integrating the cascaded production model with the exemplar theory of lexical representation, according to which words are stored in memory as sets or clouds of phonetically richly specified exemplars (Pierrehumbert 2001(Pierrehumbert , 2002.…”