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Language dominance is associated with greater speech motor adaptation in unbalanced bilinguals
Poster D54 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Madeleine Rees1, Abbie Bradshaw2, Brechtje Post1, Matt Davis2; 1University of Cambridge, UK, 2MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, UK
Introduction. In the altered auditory feedback (AAF) paradigm, the speaker learns to adjust their speech motor commands to offset the perceived error in their speech (in reality the altered feedback). This process is termed (speech motor) adaptation. Novel AAF studies in bilinguals suggest that greater second language experience is associated with stronger adaptation responses in that language, and transfer of adaptation into the unperturbed other language (Shiller et al., 2021). However, it is unclear how language dominance and task language mediate adaptation and transfer of adaptation in bilinguals, especially in similar (but not identical) vowels, and across dense and sparse vowel spaces. This experiment assesses adaptation and possible transfer in both an individual's dominant and phonologically similar non-dominant language. Methods. Two groups of English-dominant (n=14) and Spanish dominant (n=14) English/Spanish bilinguals (B2/C1-proficiency in non-dominant language) completed AAF tasks in both languages, >1 week apart. In the baseline phases, speakers produced 30 unperturbed tokens each of the words "head" (English) and "pez" (Spanish). During each Hold phase, speakers produced 120 trials each of "head" or "pez" according to their assigned perturbed language for the session. In each Hold trial, vowel productions were downshifted -130 mels in F1 and upshifted +130 mels in F2 in real time, using Audapter (Cai et al., 2008). Afterwards, in the Transfer phase, participants produced 30 trials of "head" or "pez" in the unperturbed language, thereby switching languages between phases. The last 30 trials of the Hold phase were used for analysis of online adaptation. The 30 Transfer trials were used for analysis of offline transfer of adaptation into the unperturbed language. Adaptation magnitudes were calculated by projecting F1 and F2 change from the baseline in each trial onto the vector of perfect opposition to the perturbation. Results. While producing English words, the English-dominant group showed significantly more adaptation to altered feedback than the Spanish-dominant bilinguals (p=0.039). Conversely, in the Spanish word production task, the Spanish-dominant group showed significantly higher adaptation magnitudes than the English-dominant group (p=0.032). No group significantly outperformed the other when producing words in their dominant language (p=0.44) or in their non-dominant language (p=0.39). When the language of the Transfer phase corresponded with the dominant language of the group, both groups showed adaptation significantly above 0 (English-dominant: p=0.02; Spanish-dominant: p=<0.001) despite showing non-significant or negative adaptation in their non-dominant language in the previous adjacent phase. Conclusions. Language dominance is associated positively with adaptation magnitude. Task language was not significantly associated with adaptation magnitude. It appears to be possible to transfer speech motor learning into the unperturbed dominant language offline following AAF in a non-dominant language, despite non-significant online adaptation. References: Cai, S., Boucek., M, Ghosh, S.S., Guenther, F.H., & Perkell, J.S. (2008). A system for online dynamic perturbation of formant frequencies and results from perturbation of the Mandarin triphthong /iau/. Proceedings of the 8th Intl. Seminar on Speech Production, Strasbourg, France, Dec. 8-12. Shiller, D.M., Bobbit, S. & Lametti, D. R. (2021). Sensorimotor adaptation in bilingual speech. SNL 2021 Virtual Edition, 5-8 October 2021.
Topic Areas: Speech Motor Control, Multilingualism