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On the sensitivity of bilinguals to German and Russian acoustic cues for stop consonants
Poster A34 in Poster Session A, Thursday, October 6, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Mariya Kharaman1, Natalia Bekemeier2, Carsten Eulitz1; 1University of Konstanz, 2Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
Bilingual listeners are able to handle different sets of relevant acoustic–phonetic cues from both languages. With respect to voicing contrasts in stop consonants, Russian and German are based on different laryngeal features. In Russian it is based on voice onset time (VOT, negative vs. positive), whereas in German it depends on aspiration. We predicted that the bilingual speakers would show sensitivity to both Russian and German acoustic cues. Moreover, the language dominance might result in pre-attentive preference of the native cue of the dominant language. We measured the mismatch negativity (MMN) using the roving standard design on three types of contrasts in CV-syllables in a bilingual group and, for comparison, in a German monolingual group. The bilingual group included participants born in Germany to Russian-speaking parents or brought here at an early age. Russian and German native stop contrasts as well as a contrast where both standards and deviants exhibited Russian or German acoustic cues were presented. They were spoken by four female bilingual speakers, balanced for Russian and German as a dominant language. The two groups showed different response patterns. We found an early positivity in the latency range of 200 – 250 ms which could be interpreted as an involuntary attention shift in the roving standard set-up and (late) MMN responses in the latency range from 350-400 ms. An involuntary attentional shift was invoked by the German native contrast with aspirated deviants or Russian deviants with negative VOT after German aspirated stops, i.e. it was set off by the emergence of a cue in the native German contrast or by a cue signaling a switch to the non-dominant language. Late MMN responses were observed to deviants with negative VOT irrespective of the context (preceding standards) in which it occurred as well as to an aspirated deviant in a German native contrast. The monolingual group displayed a different pattern, with an early positivity elicited by the emergence of acoustic cues in native and non-native contrasts and an MMN response to an aspirated deviant in the non-native context. In sum, bilingual participants responded to both Russian and German acoustic cues without an overt preference of their dominant language. They were also sensitive to the acoustically cued switches towards the non-dominant language.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Perception: Auditory