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When Jacques isn’t Jack: Simultaneous opposite language-specific speech perceptual learning in French-English bilinguals
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Poster D59 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Tiphaine Caudrelier1,2, Lucie Ménard3, Marie-Michèle Beausoleil3, Arthur Samuel1,4,5, Clara D. Martin1,5; 1Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain, 2Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Univ. Savoie Mont Blanc, CNRS, LPNC, Grenoble, France, 3Laboratoire de Phonétique, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 4Stony Brook University, Dept. of Psychology, Stony Brook, NY, the United States of America, 5IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain
Lexically-guided phonetic recalibration results from exposing a listener to an ambiguous sound embedded in real words that disambiguate the sound. For instance, a sound between /f/ and /s/ replacing /f/ in ‘beautiful’ will not only be perceived as /f/, after repeated exposure to the sound in various /f/-words the listener will shift his perception even in the absence of disambiguation (Kraljic & Samuel, 2006; Norris et al., 2003). Conversely the same ambiguous sound replacing /s/ in words like ‘currency’ will induce a recalibration in the opposite direction. Lexical recalibration has been shown to transfer across languages in listeners of Germanic languages like Dutch, German and English (Reinisch et al., 2013). Besides, it is possible to induce opposite recalibrations simultaneously with different talkers or sequentially with the same talker (Luthra et al., 2021; Saltzman & Myers, 2021). Here we investigate whether (1) lexical recalibration transfers across languages in French-English bilinguals and whether (2) simultaneous opposite language-specific recalibrations can be induced in those listeners with stimuli recorded by a unique bilingual talker. Sixty French-English bilinguals (age: 18-40; French AoA=0; English AoA range = 0-12 year-old) from Montreal, Canada, were tested online. They were divided into four groups. In the first phase, Groups 1 and 2 had exposure in English toward /f/ and /s/ respectively, while Groups 3 and 4 had exposure in French toward /f/ and /s/ respectively. In the second phase, participants underwent an exposure in the opposite direction and in the other language than in the first phase. These exposure blocks were interleaved with shorter blocks aimed at maintaining the initial recalibration induced in phase 1. The perceptual shift (i.e., the perceptual boundary between /f/ and /s/) was assessed in both languages at the end of both phases. We observed that (1) a perceptual shift (i.e., recalibration) occurred in all groups; (2) recalibration in one language fully transferred to the other language in the first phase, and (3) in the second phase simultaneous opposite language-specific recalibration was induced in all groups. This pattern of results suggests that bilingual listeners may have one common phonemic category for sounds that are very similar across languages, but that these representations can be teased apart into two language-specific phoneme categories based on a short exposure. Overall it highlights the malleability of our mental representations of speech sounds and the role language can play in this flexibility. References: Kraljic, T., & Samuel, A. G. (2006). Generalization in perceptual learning for speech. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 13(2), 262‑268. Luthra, S., Mechtenberg, H., & Myers, E. B. (2021). Perceptual learning of multiple talkers requires additional exposure. Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, March, 2217‑2228. Norris, D., McQueen, J. M., & Cutler, A. (2003). Perceptual learning in speech. Cognitive Psychology, 47(2), 204‑238. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0285(03)00006-9 Reinisch, E., Weber, A., & Mitterer, H. (2013). Listeners retune phoneme categories across languages. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39(1), 75‑86. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027979 Saltzman, D., & Myers, E. (2021). Listeners are initially flexible in updating phonetic beliefs over time. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Multilingualism