5 - Spoken Language Processing

Summary

The author has spent a large part of his research career studying spoken language processing in bilinguals. In this chapter, he first gives a brief overview of the stages involved in speech perception and comprehension; that is, how the listener goes from the acoustic wave all the way to the interpretative representation. He then describes a number of studies he undertook that concern primarily the processing of bilingual mixed speech. The research deals with the gender marking effect (late bilinguals appear to be largely insensitive to gender congruency and incongruency), the base-language effect (in normal bilingual discourse, base‐language units – i.e. phonemes, syllables and words – are favored over guest‐language units, at least for a short period of time), and the recognition of guest words. Here, the author showed evidence for a number of effects that occur when guest words are recognized in bilingual speech, such as a language phonetic effect, a phonotactic effect, an interlanguage homophonic status effect, and a base-language effect. He ends the chapter by describing a spoken word recognition model for bilinguals that accounts for the effects found.