bilingual phonological processing · •phonological differences •though trochaic, the second...

Bilingual phonological processing

Ashley Farris-Trimble

LSA Summer Institute

July 21, 2017

A few things to start

• Super short introductions (I’m sorry—I know you’ve done this already!)

• My office hours: after class in the library Starbucks

• Update on the final projects/presentations

• Bilingual: what definitions have you come up with so far?

• Phonologies: sound systems at a broad level; anything that might be influenced by sound systems

• Processing: how language is accessed in real-time• Here, I’ll mostly be focusing on comprehension, specifically word recognition

• Timecourse: the short-term timecourse, i.e., from the beginning of an utterance through its recognition, what happens?

Timecourse of Bilingual Phonologies

Some big questions

• How do bilinguals recognize words in each of their two languages?

• Which words compete for recognition, and how do the sound systems of the two languages influence competition?

• How is bilingual phonological processing affected by• Age (at test, at acquisition) or length of bilingualism?

• Balance between languages?

• Similarities and differences between the two languages’ sound systems?

• Dominance of language community, or language in task?

Part 1: Phonological processing in bilingual infants

Things bilingual infants must do to process speech

• Discriminate languages

• Distinguish sound systems

• Learn & recognize words

Questions about bilingual infants’ processing

• Are they delayed/advanced relative to monolingual peers?

• What tools do they use?

• Does it matter what the two languages are?

Discriminating languages: Monolinguals

Nazzi, Bertoncini & Mehler, 1998

• 40 French newborns in a high-amplitude sucking procedure

• Heard English and Japanese(or just one in control)

• sentences were low-pass filtered (preserves prosody, removes segmental info)

silence familiarization

heard different language

heard same language, different speakers

Discriminating languages: Monolinguals

Nazzi, Bertoncini & Mehler, 1998

heard different language

heard same language, different speakers

• Heard English and Dutch(or just one in control)

Monolingual newborns can use rhythmic information to discriminate languages

Discriminating languages: BilingualsSpanish/Catalan bilingual 4-month old infants in a switch task

Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001

Is this discrimination a matter of “familiar” vs. “different”? Bilinguals as test case.

Why are the monolingual results different from what we saw on the previous slides?

What strategies do bilinguals use to discriminate?

Some hypotheses:

• One-parent, one-language

• Bilinguals are attuned to metrical or distributional properties because of early exposure to two languages

• Catalan vowel reduction results in different metrical properties

Distinguishing sound systems

8- & 12-month-olds

Catalan: /e/ & /ɛ/ Spanish: /e/

4-month-olds

Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2003

Why can’t bilinguals discriminate /e/ & /ɛ/?

• Simple exposure is not sufficient; perhaps infants just need to meet an exposure threshold and bilinguals get there slower?

• Open question: Does the ability to distinguish the languages mean that infants maintain separate phonologies for them?

• The three vowels together might form a unimodal distribution, resulting in a lack of discrimination

• Additional exposure and/or lexical information by 12 months is sufficient for discrimination

Learning words

• (You talked about word learning some with AMT, right?)

Recognizing word forms

Sidebar: Why do you think preference disappears at 12 months?

Familiar vs. unfamiliar trochaic wordforms using headturn preference

Vihman et al. 2007

Results were supported by ERP studies focusing on the MMN (“oddball”)

English Welsh bilingual

What’s up with Welsh?

• Phonological differences• Though trochaic, the second part of a word is more salient

• (Unreliable) phonological processes; e.g., feminine cath y gath, but masculine car y car

• Sociolinguistic differences• Welsh speakers are usually bilingual and language is not balanced in the

community; even “monolingual” Welsh infants are exposed to English

• Thus Welsh-speaking infants, like bilingual infants, are doing two tasks: discriminating languages and discriminating familiar/unfamiliar words

Recognizing word meanings (not a ton of studies here)

• Conboy & Mills (2006): ERP study of 20-month-old Spanish/English bilinguals

• Differences in response to known vs. unknown words occurred earlier for the dominant language and earlier in kids with larger total vocabularies

• Authors interpret results to argue that the two languages are processed by “non-identical brain systems”

• Vocabulary size also plays a role (and is also impacted by bilingualism)

Part 1 Take-home points

• Bilingual infants can discriminate their two (similar) languages just as well as monolingual infants can, perhaps because they are attuned to fine-grained rhythmic or segmental properties

• Bilingual infants are delayed in discriminating contrasts that only exist in one language, perhaps because of insufficient exposure to the contrast

• Bilingual infants can distinguish familiar and unfamiliar word-forms by 12 months, and use different brain systems to process meanings by 20 months

Challenges in bilingualism research

• Language pairs (each pair poses a different set of similarities and differences in any number of factors)

• Contexts of exposure (in which contexts and with which speakers does each language occur)

• Social status of the languages (majority/minority language, high/low prestige)

• Confound with socioeconomic status (sometimes bilinguals are systematically different SES than monolinguals)

• Language dominance

• Age of acquisition (and simultaneous/sequential bilingualism)Werker & Byers-Heinlein, 2008

bilingual phonological processing · •phonological differences •though trochaic, the second...

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