AI Article Synopsis

  • * The current study uses an implicit approach to examine L2 phoneme discrimination among early bilinguals who speak Catalan and Spanish.
  • * Results show that Catalan-dominant bilinguals were slower in processing sounds when the second syllable had variable sounds, indicating they categorize L2 sounds based on their L1, unlike Spanish-dominant participants.

Article Abstract

Previous studies have suggested that nonnative (L2) linguistic sounds are accommodated to native language (L1) phonemic categories. However, this conclusion may be compromised by the use of explicit discrimination tests. The present study provides an implicit measure of L2 phoneme discrimination in early bilinguals (Catalan and Spanish). Participants classified the 1st syllable of disyllabic stimuli embedded in lists where the 2nd, task-irrelevant, syllable could contain a Catalan contrastive variation (/epsilon/-/e/) or no variation. Catalan dominants responded more slowly in lists where the 2nd syllable could vary from trial to trial, suggesting an indirect effect of the /epsilon/-/e/ discrimination. Spanish dominants did not suffer this interference, performing indistinguishably from Spanish monolinguals. The present findings provide implicit evidence that even proficient bilinguals categorize L2 sounds according to their L1 representations.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.31.5.912DOI Listing

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