Acquisition of new phonetic categories by bilingual and monolingual groups: Role of metalinguistic awareness and feature generalization.

Abstract

The present study examines the role of feature generalization and metalinguistic awareness in the perception and learning of novel non‐native speech contrasts by 40 bilingual speakers (Bengali–English and Spanish–English) and 20 monolingual speakers of American English. Bilinguals, unlike monolinguals, employ certain cognitive and linguistic skills during lexical processing and word learning attributed as metalinguistic awareness. This awareness in turn, can be applied in mastering unfamiliar phonetic features in a third language. A second issue concerns the role that native phonetic features may play in the development of new phonetic categories involving same phonetic features (feature generalization hypothesis). To explore both factors, a high variability perception training paradigm was used to examine the acquisition of novel non‐native speech contrasts (containing dental/alveolar‐retroflex place distinction in various manners) from a target language, Malayalam. A consonant identification procedure was used throughout the training and testing phases of the experiment to examine post‐test and generalization performance across groups. Productions of the stimuli were also recorded at the pretest and posttest phases. In addition, perceptual assimilation patterns were analyzed from consonant assimilation and discrimination scores before and after training.