Presentation

Hia Datta¹, Monica Wagner², Nancy Vidal-Finnerty³, Yuga Kothari⁴, Valerie Shafer⁴; ¹Molloy College, ²St. John's University, ³Iona College, ⁴The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Considerable research reveals that bilingual individuals navigate the speech landscape differently than those who are functionally monolingual. Studies of speech perception have asked whether good proficiency in a bilingual’s two languages allows for fast and efficient recovery of lexical meaning in both languages (Strange, 2011). Late learners of a second language (L2) typically show different perceptual patterns in the L2 because they fall back on first language (L1) speech perception routines, particularly for difficult tasks. Early bilinguals often show comparable speech perception to monolinguals. Several studies, however, suggest processing differences between monolinguals and bilinguals in attention to speech (Datta et al. 2020). We examined electrophysiological responses to determine whether early Spanish-English bilingual listeners process speech differently than American-English monolinguals. Twenty-one adults (7 bilinguals) and 26 five-to seven-year-old children (13 bilingual) listened to the American English 250-ms vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/ presented in sequences of 10 stimuli, while brain responses were recorded from 65 scalp electrode sites. The participants ignored the stimuli and watched a muted movie to allow examination of automaticity of processing. The analysis focused on the obligatory auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) to /ɛ/. Monolinguals and bilinguals showed remarkably similar-morphology brain responses. The latencies of AEP peaks (P1, N1, P2, N2 for adults and P100 N2 for children) at fronto-central sites showed nearly identical latencies for monolingual and bilingual groups. However, bilingual compared to monolingual adults showed greater negative amplitude around the N1 latency at frontal sites (Nd attentional effect). In contrast, the bilingual and monolingual children showed highly similar patterns. The pattern of AEPs differed in relation to position in the sequence, indicating repetition effects that were similar across language groups, but differed for adults and children. Results will be discussed in terms of maturation of speech processing and models of prediction and attention.

Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Speech Perception