Chinese-English bilinguals are more sensitive to environmental sound perception than Spanish-English bilinguals through top-down cognitive mechanism.

Sensitive perception to environmental sound is important for an individual's daily life since it helps in responding to the environment quickly and avoiding potential risks. It remains unclear, however, whether and how bilingual experiences with different native language backgrounds influence brain responses reflecting environmental sound perception. The present study compared Chinese-English bilinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals, and English monolinguals on their brain response to environmental sound perception and further examined its processing mechanism. The present study did not find the differences between English monolinguals and two bilingual groups on the environmental sound perception. However, we found that compared with Spanish-English bilinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals showed significantly larger mismatch negativity (MMN), indicating that Chinese-English bilinguals were more sensitive to the environmental sounds than that of Spanish-English bilinguals. Further, compared with Spanish-English bilinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals showed significantly larger theta oscillation. In addition, the theta oscillation is significantly correlated with MMN for Chinese-English bilinguals. The results indicated that the advantage of Chinese-English bilingual experience on environmental sound perception may be due to the enhanced top-down cognitive ability. In summary, these findings suggest that compared with the Spanish-English bilinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals showed an advantage in environmental sound perception via enhanced top-down cognitive modulation.