Perception of English phonetic contrasts by Dutch children: How bilingual are early-English learners?

Goriot, Claire; McQueen, James M.; Unsworth, Sharon; Hout, R.W.N.M. van; Broersma, Mirjam

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0229902

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Moreover, unlike discrimination tasks, nAFC tasks are feasible in diverse populations [i.e., younger children see ( Slawinski and Fitzgerald, 1998 ; Hazan and Barrett, 2000 ); people with language impairments ( Serniclaes, 2006 ); as well as bilinguals ( Sebastián-Gallés and Bosch, 2002 ; Aoyama et al, 2004 ; Goriot et al, 2020 )]. Many of these sorts of studies conducted on LX learners 1 and clinical populations using forced-choice identification tasks use the slope of the categorization function as an index of speech categorization ability.…”

Section: Categorical Perception In Language Science Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Second, bilingualism research also makes heavy use of the discrimination and identification tasks that were pioneered in monolingual speech categorization ( Werker and Tees, 1987 ; Sebastián-Gallés and Bosch, 2002 ; Aoyama et al, 2004 ; Goriot et al, 2020 ). Given the assumption of CP, a shallower slope of the identification function has been associated with deficits or as an inability to map LX categories accurately due to factors such as age of acquisition or proficiency.…”

Section: Categorical Perception and Bilingualismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Moving away from deficiency models: Gradiency in bilingual speech categorization

2022

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For much of its history, categorical perception was treated as a foundational theory of speech perception, which suggested that quasi-discrete categorization was a goal of speech perception. This had a profound impact on bilingualism research which adopted similar tasks to use as measures of nativeness or native-like processing, implicitly assuming that any deviation from discreteness was a deficit. This is particularly problematic for listeners like heritage speakers whose language proficiency, both in their heritage language and their majority language, is questioned. However, we now know that in the monolingual listener, speech perception is gradient and listeners use this gradiency to adjust subphonetic details, recover from ambiguity, and aid learning and adaptation. This calls for new theoretical and methodological approaches to bilingualism. We present the Visual Analogue Scaling task which avoids the discrete and binary assumptions of categorical perception and can capture gradiency more precisely than other measures. Our goal is to provide bilingualism researchers new conceptual and empirical tools that can help examine speech categorization in different bilingual communities without the necessity of forcing their speech categorization into discrete units and without assuming a deficit model.

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