Phoneme Identification in Bilingual Children in Singapore – A preregistered investigation using the CROWN Game

Ke, Han; Pan, Lina; Ba, O'Brien; Styles, Suzy J

doi:10.31234/osf.io/3cgjh

Cited by 3 publications

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“…One study on the categorical perception of Mandarin stops suggested that the discrimination abilities of VOT were still in development among adolescents aged 12 to 14 years (Meng et al, 2020). In a related study on the categorical perception of English /b/ and /p/ in 6-year-old English/Chinese bilingual children from Singapore (Ke et al, 2021), children show clear boundaries between categories, but substantially lower slopes than adults in the current study. While the current study reveals that early bilingual balance influences the slope of categorical perception of bilingual adults, in the previous study, children exhibited substantial variability in slope values, but the variability was independent from their language exposure.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 52%

Early linguistic experience shapes bilingual adults’ hearing for phonemes in both languages

Pan¹,

Han²,

Styles³

2021

Preprint

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How do bilinguals represent category structure for phonemes in early acquired languages? /b/ and /p/ voice onset times (VOTs) are earlier and closer together in English than in Mandarin. Hence the category boundary and the steepness of the transition can show ‘tuning’ to language-specific acoustic structure (i.e., earlier boundary and steeper slope for English). As preregistered, we mapped identification functions of early English-Mandarin bilingual adults (N=66) on a /b/ - /p/ VOT continuum in each language. Individual bilingual-balance was derived using principal component analysis and entered into GLMMs of categorical boundary and slope. As predicted, VOTs were earlier for English than Mandarin. Early bilingual-balance predicted the slope of the transition between categories: Those who heard more English from an earlier age showed steeper slopes than those who heard more Mandarin. Findings are consistent with discrete representations for each language, and transfer of category structure from the earlier acquired language.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 52%

Early linguistic experience shapes bilingual adults’ hearing for phonemes in both languages

Pan¹,

Han²,

Styles³

2021

Preprint

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“…designed a new paradigm to obtain a more fine-grained measure of phoneme contrast perceptionthe Spring-Village CROWN Game. The Spring-Village CROWN Game is based on a 2-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task created byKe et al (2021) known as the CROWN Game. In this paradigm, participants are presented with sound tokens drawn from a continuum of speech sounds varying in acoustic ambiguity from each other.…”

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confidence: 99%

Language-specific distributional learning advantages in Singapore English-Mandarin bilingual adults

Goh

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This thesis contains material from 1 paper published in the following peerreviewed journal -PeerJin which I am listed as an author. This thesis also contains material from 1 paper which is at the preprint stage and can be found on PsyArXivin which I am listed as an author.The studies reported in Chapter 2 are also reported in Goh, H. L., Onnis, L., & Styles, S. J. ( 2023). Is retroflexion a stable cue for distributional learning for speech sounds across languages? Learning for some bilingual adults, but not generalisable to a wider population in a well powered pre-registered study. PeerJ,

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Early linguistic experience shapes bilingual adults’ hearing for phonemes in both languages

Pan

Styles

2022

Sci Rep

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English and Mandarin Chinese differ in the voice onset times (VOTs) of /b/ and /p/. Hence the way bilinguals perceive these sounds may show ‘tuning’ to the language-specific acoustic structure of a bilingual’s languages (a discrete model), or a shared representation across languages (a unitary model). We investigated whether an individual’s early childhood exposure influences their model of phoneme perception across languages, in a large sample of early English-Mandarin bilingual adults in Singapore (N = 66). As preregistered, we mapped identification functions on a /b/-/p/ VOT continuum in each language. Bilingual balance was estimated using principal components analysis and entered into GLMMs of phoneme boundary and slope. VOT boundaries were earlier for English than Mandarin, and bilingual balance predicted the slope of the transition between categories across both languages: Those who heard more English from an earlier age showed steeper category boundaries than those who heard more Mandarin, suggesting early bilinguals may transfer their model for how phonemes differ from their earlier/stronger languages to later/weaker languages. We describe the transfer model of discrete phoneme representations and its implications for use of the phoneme identification task in diverse populations.

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Phoneme Identification in Bilingual Children in Singapore – A preregistered investigation using the CROWN Game

Cited by 3 publications

References 36 publications

Early linguistic experience shapes bilingual adults’ hearing for phonemes in both languages

Early linguistic experience shapes bilingual adults’ hearing for phonemes in both languages

Language-specific distributional learning advantages in Singapore English-Mandarin bilingual adults

Early linguistic experience shapes bilingual adults’ hearing for phonemes in both languages

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