Assessing the differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers in a tongue-twister task: Is there evidence for a bilingual advantage?

Abstract

While not uncontroversial, the claim that bilingual experience underlies certain cognitive advantages has been at the forefront of recent work. Thus, enhanced skills were associated with bilingualism in terms of multitasking, auditory encoding of sound, and resistance to dementia. Among the mechanisms potentially supporting the cognitive differences between mono- and bilinguals, those pertaining to executive function have been investigated extensively. Our study adds to a more recently initiated direction seeking to determine if there is also a connection between bilingualism and sensorimotor mechanisms. Specifically, we explore experimentally articulatory skill, expressed as accuracy, speed, and acoustic prototypicality in the production of tongue-twisters. Three groups of undergraduates (n = 40)—monolingual, early bilinguals, and late bilinguals—read artificially constructed tongue-twisters such as “kifkivkivkif” three times in succession, matching a 150 bps rhythm on a metronome. After a practice session, each participant read 64 items, many of which induced mispronunciations. The productions were manually evaluated for correctness, revealing that the monolinguals and late bilinguals outperformed the early bilinguals. In the next phase, acoustic analyses will be performed to determine more fine-grained phonetic properties, e.g., consonant duration, formant transitions, and extent of devoicing, possibly revealing different hyper-/hypoarticulation patterns in the three groups.