Abstract
Listeners often experience cocktail-party situations, encountering multiple ongoing conversations while tracking just one. Capturing the words spoken under such conditions requires selective attention and processing, which involves using phonetic details to discern phonological structure. How do bilinguals accomplish this in L1-L2 competition? We addressed that question using a dichotic listening task with fluent Malayalam-English bilinguals, in which they were presented with synchronized nonce words, one in each language in separate ears, with competing onsets of a labial stop (Malayalam) and a labial fricative (English), both voiced or both voiceless. They were required to attend to the Malayalam or the English item, in separate blocks, and report the initial consonant they heard. We found that perceptual intrusions from the unattended to the attended language were influenced by voicing, with more intrusions on voiced than voiceless trials. This result supports our proposal for the feature specification of consonants in Malayalam-English bilinguals, which makes use of privative features, underspecification and the “standard approach” to laryngeal features, as against “laryngeal realism”. Given this representational account, we observe that intrusions result from phonetic properties in the unattended signal being assimilated to the closest matching phonological category in the attended language, and are more likely for segments with a greater number of phonological feature specifications.
Highlights
Listening to speech in the real world involves continuous detection and processing of speech signals in a situation where conditions are not ideal
An intrusion was defined as an incorrect response influenced by the stimulus played in the unattended ear
6 Conclusion In this study we tested adult L2 dominant bilinguals using a task that combines the involvement of selective-attention mechanisms alongside normal signal processing, in a manner that listeners – especially bilingual listeners – are often faced with in situations akin to cocktail-party paradigms
Summary
Listening to speech in the real world involves continuous detection and processing of speech signals in a situation where conditions are not ideal. Competing speech signals vie for the listener’s attention, so that the listener’s task includes isolating a single target utterance as well as locating meaningful linguistic units, processing them for a meaningful message and interpreting the total message to arrive at its semantic content. For all listeners, processing speech requires a combination of both linguistic and non-linguistic mental/cognitive and motor functions; for bilingual listeners the linguistic functions are potentially increased to encompass the phonological grammars of two languages It is only by a combination of all these functions that active speech perception, and comprehension, is made possible
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