Description
Variability across speakers and across languages makes speech perception a surprisingly complex task, as there are not exact numerical values you can memorize to determine what speech sound someone is intending at any given time without understanding the speaker context. For example, one acoustic cue is voice onset time (VOT), a measure for the length of different stop consonants. In English, voiced stop consonants like /b/ have short VOTs (around 0ms) and voiceless stop consonants like /p/ have longer VOTs (around 40ms). In Spanish, the same sounds are shifted in VOT, such that /b/ is pre-voiced with a VOT around -40ms and /p/ has a VOT around 0ms. Thus an English voiced phoneme and a Spanish voiceless phoneme actually have identical VOTs. This is especially relevant for bilingual speakers, who need to know the rules for phoneme pronunciation in multiple languages. The specific goal of our research project was to investigate how bilingual English-Spanish speakers shift their perceived VOT boundary based on language context. Researcher interacted with participants in either all English or all Spanish, and then participants completed an experiment where they were asked what they heard for a variety of pairs of words/non-words that exist in English and/or Spanish (e.g., basta/pasta where both are words in Spanish but only pasta is a word in English). We hope the results of this project will give us more insight into how bilingual individuals switch between languages and how task-switching affects even their basic perception of sounds.
Effects of Task Language on English and Spanish Bilinguals' Speech Perception Study
Variability across speakers and across languages makes speech perception a surprisingly complex task, as there are not exact numerical values you can memorize to determine what speech sound someone is intending at any given time without understanding the speaker context. For example, one acoustic cue is voice onset time (VOT), a measure for the length of different stop consonants. In English, voiced stop consonants like /b/ have short VOTs (around 0ms) and voiceless stop consonants like /p/ have longer VOTs (around 40ms). In Spanish, the same sounds are shifted in VOT, such that /b/ is pre-voiced with a VOT around -40ms and /p/ has a VOT around 0ms. Thus an English voiced phoneme and a Spanish voiceless phoneme actually have identical VOTs. This is especially relevant for bilingual speakers, who need to know the rules for phoneme pronunciation in multiple languages. The specific goal of our research project was to investigate how bilingual English-Spanish speakers shift their perceived VOT boundary based on language context. Researcher interacted with participants in either all English or all Spanish, and then participants completed an experiment where they were asked what they heard for a variety of pairs of words/non-words that exist in English and/or Spanish (e.g., basta/pasta where both are words in Spanish but only pasta is a word in English). We hope the results of this project will give us more insight into how bilingual individuals switch between languages and how task-switching affects even their basic perception of sounds.