Mark Amengual

Interlingual influence in bilingual speech: Cognate status effect in a continuum of bilingualism

The present study investigates voice onset times (VOTs) to determine if cognates enhance the cross-language phonetic influences in the speech production of a range of Spanish–English bilinguals: Spanish heritage speakers, English heritage speakers, advanced L2 Spanish learners, and advanced L2 English learners. To answer this question, lexical items with considerable phonological, semantic, and orthographic overlap (cognates) and lexical items with no phonological overlap with their English translation equivalents (non-cognates) were examined. The results indicate that there is a significant effect of cognate status in the Spanish production of VOT by Spanish–English bilinguals. These bilinguals produced /t/ with longer VOT values (more English-like) in the Spanish production of cognates compared to non-cognate words. It is proposed that the exemplar model of lexical representation (Bybee, 2001; Pierrehumbert, 2001) can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections by which cognates facilitate phonetic interference in the bilingual mental lexicon.

The perception and production of language-specific mid-vowel contrasts: Shifting the focus to the bilingual individual in early language input conditions:

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This study investigates the perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel contrasts by 60 early Spanish-Catalan bilinguals addressing the following questions: (1) what are the effects of language dominance in the production and perception of the Catalan midvowels? (2) Does the perceptual deficit attributed in Barcelona remain in Majorca? (3) Do these bilinguals maintain the mid-vowel contrasts in production? And (4) what is the relationship between the perception and production of the mid-vowel contrasts within each bilingual individual? Design/Methodology/Approach: Participants completed categorical AXB discrimination and picture-naming tasks to examine their perception and production of the Catalan mid-vowel contrasts. Data and Analysis: The perception data consisted of 8,640 responses and the production dataset comprised 9,585 acoustic measurements that were submitted to mixed-model ANOVAs. Individual variation was explored by calculating the Euclidean distance between the mid-vowel categories for each speaker and exploring correlations with their accuracy rates in the perception task. Findings/Conclusions: The results indicate that mid-vowels are more susceptible to discrimination difficulties than other vowel contrasts. Even though these bilinguals overall maintain robust midvowel contrasts in their productions, a closer examination reveals that the degree of language dominance affects the acoustic distance maintained between the mid-vowel targets. Individuals that produced the mid-vowels with smaller Euclidean distances were more likely to have a higher error rate in the perception task than bilinguals who produced a more robust contrast. Originality: This study examines both mid-vowel contrasts in a variety of Catalan that has been reported to maintain robust mid-vowel contrasts in comparison to the acquisition deficit described in Barcelona, and explores the relationship between the production and perception abilities of each bilingual individual along a continuum of language dominance. Significance/Implications: This study contributes with new data to the study of language dominance and the relationship between the production and perception abilities of early and highly proficient bilinguals.

The Effects of Language Dominance in the Perception and Production of the Galician Mid Vowel Contrasts

Aims: This study investigates the perception and production of the Galician mid vowel contrasts by 54 early Spanish-Galician bilinguals in the cities of Vigo and Santiago (Galicia, Spain). Empirical data is provided to examine the role of language dominance in the perception and production of Galician mid vowel contrasts in order to determine whether the Galician vowel system is becoming more Spanish-like as a result of extensive contact with Spanish in urban areas. Methods: Perception and production data for each mid vowel contrast were collected in (1) binary forced-choice identification tasks, (2) AX discrimination tasks and (3) a reading-aloud task. Results: Results from binary forced-choice identification and AX discrimination tasks indicate that Spanish-dominant bilinguals have great difficulty in discriminating between these mid vowels while Galician-dominant subjects display a robust categorical identification of the two mid vowel categories. Acoustic analyses of their productions show that Galician-dominant bilinguals implement a Galician-specific /e/-/ɛ/ contrast but Spanish-dominant ones produce a single, merged Spanish-like front mid vowel. However, both language dominance groups seem to maintain a more robust /o/-/ɔ/ contrast. This asymmetry between front and back mid vowels is found in the productions of both language dominance groups. Conclusion: These results show that language dominance is a strong predictor of the production and perception abilities of Spanish-Galician bilinguals, and that only Galician-dominant subjects in these urban areas possess two independent phonetic categories in the front and back mid vowel space.

The perception of language-specific phonetic categories does not guarantee accurate phonological representations in the lexicon of early bilinguals

This study examines the perception and processing of the Catalan /e/–/ɛ/ and /o/–/ɔ/ vowel contrasts by 60 Spanish–Catalan bilinguals in Majorca (Spain). Results from binary forced-choice identification, AX discrimination, and lexical decision tasks show that even though these early and highly proficient bilinguals demonstrate a high accuracy in perceptual identification and discrimination tasks, they have difficulties distinguishing between words and nonwords in a lexical decision task. Spanish dominants also exhibited higher error rates than Catalan dominants in the lexical decision task. These findings provide evidence that making explicit judgments regarding whether a certain sound belongs to a phonemic category (i.e., as accomplished via identification and discrimination tasks) does not entail that listeners have an appropriate representation at the lexical level.

Fine-grained and probabilistic cross-linguistic influence in the pronunciation of cognates: Evidence from corpus-based spontaneous conversation and experimentally elicited data

Abstract The present study examines variable realizations of Spanish word-initial voiced and voiceless dental stops in Spanish-English cognate pairs. Employing a variationist approach to naturalistic data, we report significantly decreased likelihood of reduced articulations of word-initial /d/ in cognates in spontaneous bilingual Puerto Rican discourse, and no such probabilistic effect for cognates in monolingual Spanish of the same speech community. Using experimentally controlled elicited data of Spanish word-initial /t/, we also find evidence of significant fine-grained effects of English on the articulations of Spanish cognates in the form of lengthened VOT for Spanish-English bilinguals. These results indicate that cross-language lexical connections affect phonetic categories in the speech production of Spanish-English bilinguals. It is proposed that both fine-grained and probabilistic effects of the phonology of one language on another can be explained within the Exemplar Model of Lexical Representation.

Type of early bilingualism and its effect on the acoustic realization of allophonic variants: Early sequential and simultaneous bilinguals:

Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: This study examines the acoustic realization of phrase-initial voiced stops (/b, d, g/) and intervocalic voiced approximants ([β, ð, ɣ]) in Spanish by three groups of Spanish–English bilinguals: simultaneous bilinguals, early sequential bilinguals, and late second language (L2) Spanish learners to investigate if the type of early bilingualism has an effect on the acoustic realization of language-specific phonological processes. Design/Methodology/Approach: Early bilinguals were divided into two groups (simultaneous and sequential bilinguals), and together with late learners (L2 Spanish learners) they were recorded producing words eliciting phrase-initial and intervocalic voiced stops. Data and Analysis: The acoustic analyses examined the difference between the intensity minimum during the consonant and the intensity maximum of the following tautosyllabic vowel (intensity difference). The dataset comprised a total of 3,569 acoustic measurements. Findings/Conclusions: The group of early sequential bilinguals shows a significantly stronger tendency to produce a more lenited intervocalic segment than simultaneous bilinguals and L2 learners, who produce a more constricted realization. These data indicate that simultaneous bilinguals and L2 learners, who were exposed to English since birth, differ from early bilinguals who were exclusively exposed to Spanish for the first years of their life when applying the Spanish allophonic rule governing the distribution of voiced stops and spirants. Originality: This is one of the first studies that investigates the effects of the type of early bilingualism on bilingual phonetic performance in adulthood, especially in terms of bilingual phonetic production. These novel data examine the acoustic realization of Spanish heritage speakers, a largely understudied bilingual population. Significance/Implications: The findings suggest that the type of early bilingualism in language development, even at a very early age, still has consequences on the acoustic realization of allophonic variants in adulthood.

Asymmetrical interlingual influence in the production of Spanish and English laterals as a result of competing activation in bilingual language processing

Abstract This study examines the phonetic and phonological knowledge of Spanish and English /l/ by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals along a continuum of language dominance. Forty early Spanish-English bilinguals, divided into groups as a function of their immigrant generation (G1.5, G2, G3), and twenty L2 Spanish learners produced word-initial and word-final laterals in three separate sessions: monolingual Spanish session, monolingual English session, and bilingual Spanish/English session. Results indicate that all participants acquired the phonetic and allophonic characteristics of the lateral variants in each language, and that language dominance strongly predicts these bilinguals’ acoustic realization of Spanish and English laterals. The acoustic analyses reveal phonetic convergence as a result of language mode, but it is especially the laterals in the non-dominant language that are altered in bilingual mode. This study provides evidence of language dominance effects on the acoustic realization of Spanish and English laterals, and demonstrates the impact of language mode on the phonetic abilities of early and late bilinguals. It is proposed that a model of bilingual processing based on the principles of episodic frameworks, in which exemplars in a bilingual lexicon develop connections across languages and lexical processing activates the words of both languages non-selectively, can explain these findings.

Phonological activation of first language (Spanish) and second language (English) when learning third language (Slovak) novel words

Objectives/Research Questions: This study investigates whether bilinguals activate lexical knowledge from both their dominant first language (L1; Spanish) and their less-dominant second language (L2; English) during novel third language (L3; Slovak) word learning. Moreover, it examines the extent to which L2 activation in L3 lexical learning depends on the level of L2 proficiency. Methodology: Stimuli included 120 auditory Slovak words with substantial phonological overlap with either English or Spanish (homophones) or with neither language (control words), and their written Spanish translations. Two groups of participants (with high and low-proficiency in L2 English) completed paired-associate learning, correct/incorrect translation recognition and backward translation tasks on Slovak–Spanish translation equivalents to examine the facilitation effect of homophones with either Spanish or English. Data and Analysis: Response times, accuracy scores and correct translation counts were collected from 35 Spanish–English bilinguals and analyzed by means of repeated measures analyses of variance. Findings/Conclusions: The phonological similarity of novel L3 words with participants’ L2 words showed similar facilitation effects as phonological similarity with L1 words. This implies an involuntary activation of bilinguals’ less-dominant L2, even when not overtly present in the L3 lexical learning task. Moreover, the low-proficiency group experienced a higher facilitation for L1 than for L2 homophones, but overall lower facilitation in L3 lexical learning than the high-proficiency group. These findings suggest that bilinguals can activate lexical knowledge from both of their languages during novel L3 word learning, but the activation of the less-dominant L2 depends on participants’ L2 proficiency. Originality: We investigated how Spanish–English bilinguals incorporate vocabulary from an understudied language (i.e. Slovak) into their lexical system to test the language non-selective hypothesis in a multilingual lexical context. Significance: Our research contributes to the study of the degree of language dominance and its implications for L3 lexical learning and parallel activation of multilinguals’ languages.

Contents Vol. 72, 2015

Sonia Frota, Lisbon (Portugal) Wentao Gu, Nanjing (China) Rachel Hayes-Harb, Salt Lake City, Utah (USA) Sarah Hawkins, Cambridge (United Kingdom) Allard Jongman, Lawrence, Kans. (USA) Ghada Khattab, Newcastle upon Tyne (United Kingdom) Ineke Mennen, Graz (Austria) Richard Ogden, York (United Kingdom) Marianne Pouplier, Munich (Germany) Rachel Walker, Los Angeles, Calif. (USA) Patrick C.M. Wong, Hong Kong (China)