Phonetic Variation in Bilingual Speech: A Lens for Studying the Production-comprehension Link

Overview

Journal J Mem Lang

Publisher Elsevier

Date 2016 Jul 19

PMID 27429511

Citations 27

Authors

Melinda Fricke

Judith F Kroll

Paola E Dussias

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

We exploit the unique phonetic properties of bilingual speech to ask how processes occurring during planning affect speech articulation, and whether listeners can use the phonetic modulations that occur in anticipation of a codeswitch to help restrict their lexical search to the appropriate language. An analysis of spontaneous bilingual codeswitching in the Bangor Miami Corpus (Deuchar et al., 2014) reveals that in anticipation of switching languages, Spanish-English bilinguals produce slowed speech rate and cross-language phonological influence on consonant voice onset time. A study of speech comprehension using the visual world paradigm demonstrates that bilingual listeners can indeed exploit these low-level phonetic cues to anticipate that a codeswitch is coming and to suppress activation of the non-target language. We discuss the implications of these results for current theories of bilingual language regulation, and situate them in terms of recent proposals relating the coupling of the production and comprehension systems more generally.

Citing Articles

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