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Navigating conflicting phonotactic constraints in bilingual speech perception*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2015

MATTHEW T. CARLSON ,
MATTHEW GOLDRICK ,
MICHAEL BLASINGAME  and
ANGELA FINK
MATTHEW T. CARLSON*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
MATTHEW GOLDRICK
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
MICHAEL BLASINGAME
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
ANGELA FINK
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
*
Address for correspondence: Matthew T. Carlson, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, The Pennsylvania State University, 211 Burrowes Bldg. University Park, PA 16802mtc173@psu.edu
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Abstract

Word-initial /s/-consonant clusters do not occur in Spanish. Confronted with such sequences (e.g., in loanwords), Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory initial /e/, ‘repairing’ the illicit sequence. In two experiments, both conducted in Spanish with Spanish-sounding nonwords, we ask whether knowledge of English, which has no restriction against this sound sequence, weakens this pattern of perceptual repair in fluent Spanish–English bilinguals, and whether the effects of English depend on language dominance. In both identification and discrimination tasks, bilinguals exhibited weaker perceptual repair effects relative to Spanish monolinguals. This was true even for bilinguals dominant in Spanish, though the weakening was more pronounced for English-dominant bilinguals. These results show that conflicting phonotactic systems can jointly influence bilinguals’ perceptual repair of the acoustic signal in the more restrictive language, even when it is the bilingual's dominant language, suggesting a degree of integration and mutual influence of knowledge between both their languages.

Keywords

phonotacticsbilingualismspeech perceptionperceptual repaircrosslinguistic influence
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Issue 5 , November 2016 , pp. 939 - 954
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Angela Bennett, Jennifer Ponce, Kyra Krass and Alex McAllister for their help collecting data, and the Northwestern SoundLab for helpful comments on the manuscript. This research was conducted with support of NSF grants BCS0846147 and BCS1344269.

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