Navigating conflicting phonotactic constraints in bilingual speech perception

Abstract

Word-initial /s/-consonant clusters do not occur in Spanish. Confronted with such sequences (e.g., in loanwords), Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory initial /e/, ‘repairing’ the illicit sequence. In two experiments, both conducted in Spanish with Spanish-sounding nonwords, we ask whether knowledge of English, which has no restriction against this sound sequence, weakens this pattern of perceptual repair in fluent Spanish–English bilinguals, and whether the effects of English depend on language dominance. In both identification and discrimination tasks, bilinguals exhibited weaker perceptual repair effects relative to Spanish monolinguals. This was true even for bilinguals dominant in Spanish, though the weakening was more pronounced for English-dominant bilinguals. These results show that conflicting phonotactic systems can jointly influence bilinguals’ perceptual repair of the acoustic signal in the more restrictive language, even when it is the bilingual's dominant language, suggesting a degree of integration and mutual influence of knowledge between both their languages.

Effects of native language experience on Mandarin lexical tone processing in proficient second language learners

“…The LHQ is designed to examine detailed aspects of language acquisition and language usage, including self‐evaluations of reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills for all mastered languages and whether the participants had taken a standard language proficiency test. LHQ has been used and proven effective in a number of previous L2 studies (e.g., Carlson, Goldrick, Blasingame, & Fink, ; Kuhl et al, ; Yang et al, ) and has been validated by these studies with other objective tests of proficiency (e.g., high consistency between LHQ measure and verbal fluency test; see Grant & Li, ). Based on the participants’ answers to the LHQ, the two groups of L2 learners were matched on their self‐evaluations of Mandarin reading, writing, speaking, listening, F (1, 28) = 1.346, p = .256, η p 2 = .046; F (1, 28) = 0.280, p = .601, η p 2 = .010; F (1, 28) = .040, p = .843, η p 2 = .001; F (1, 28) = 1.471, p = .235, η p 2 = .050.…”

Now you hear it, now you don't: Malleable illusory vowel effects in Spanish–English bilinguals

“…AX was chosen here, for several reasons. First, it allows direct comparison with the results of Carlson et al (2016) and Carlson (published online April 9, 2018), whose materials were adopted here. Second, AX can be configured to focus on fine acoustic differences (as described below).…”

“…Spanish phonotactics should cause the shorter vowel to be perceived as [e], leading to more "same" responses on longer-[e] pairs vs. longer-[a] pairs. Knowing English, however, is expected to allow bilinguals to perceive the shorter vowel items more veridically, facilitating discrimination of the longer-[e] pairs (Carlson et al, 2016). If this effect reflects competition between veridical (English-like) and repaired (Spanish-like) phonetic representations, and not merely the retuning of speech perception in an English-dominant environment, then activating English via the verbal fluency and cloze tasks should also lead to longer response times for longer-[e] pairs in the English-switch group, as it did for the bilinguals immersed in English (Carlson, published online April 9, 2018), and possibly greater accuracy for longer-[e] pairs.…”

“…Unlike monolinguals, early Spanish-English bilinguals, especially those dominant in English, are unlikely to report hearing [e] when no vowel is present, and they are less susceptible than monolinguals to the effects of perceptual repair on auditory discrimination (Carlson et al, 2016). This apparent weakening of the perceptual illusion may reflect interacting phonotactic systems, but it could simply be that the early bilinguals never acquired the illusion.…”

Perception of nonnative tonal contrasts by Mandarin-English and English-Mandarin sequential bilinguals

“…These L1 selective perception routines are crucial to becoming a skilled listener of the L1 but may be unhelpful for processing a different language (which is likely to vary in terms of which acoustic cues are relevant for identifying phonemes). As a result, L2 learners are observed, over time, to develop new selective perception routines for processing the L2, which may also be drawn upon for processing the L1 (e.g., Carlson et al, 2016). In the case of L3 perception, bilingual listeners may therefore bring L1 and/or L2 selective perception routines to the task.…”