Abstract
To compare the ability to recognize sentences in silence and in noise in monolingual normal-hearing Brazilian Portuguese speakers, and bilingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and German, and bilingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and Italian, as well as to analyze the influence of age of second language acquisition on the performance of bilinguals. 87 normal-hearing individuals aged between 18 and 55 years participated of this research. They were categorized into: Control Group, composed by 30 monolingual Brazilian Portuguese speakers; German Research Group, 31 simultaneous bilingual native speakers of Portuguese and speakers of German as a second language and; Italian Research Group, consisting of 26 successive bilinguals, native speakers of Portuguese and speakers of Italian as a second language. The Sentence List Test in Brazilian Portuguese was used to measure their Sentence Recognition Thresholds in Silence and Noise. In silence, there were no statistically significant differences in performance when comparing the bilingual to the monolingual individuals, and when comparing the bilingual speakers among themselves. On the other hand, in noise, there was a significant difference between the bilingual groups and the monolingual one. However, there were no significant differences between the bilingual groups when their performance was compared. Bilingualism positively influenced the development of language and listening skills, which led the bilinguals to outperform in speech recognition in the presence of noise. Also, the period of a second language acquisition did not influence bilingual performance.
Highlights
The increase in the number of bilingual speakers is a worldwide phenomenon that largely stems from globalization and immigration, leading to ever stronger social and cultural changes that require people to learn more foreign languages because they are exposed to diversity
Similar performance was found when comparing monolingual (CG) and bilingual speakers of German (GSG) and Italian (ISG) in speech recognition in silence, while for the measurements collected in the presence of noise, there was a significant difference between monolingual (GC) and bilingual groups (Table 1)
There was no difference between simultaneous bilinguals (GSG) and successive bilinguals (ISG) in silent and in noise speech recognition tasks (Table 2)
Summary
The increase in the number of bilingual speakers is a worldwide phenomenon that largely stems from globalization and immigration, leading to ever stronger social and cultural changes that require people to learn more foreign languages because they are exposed to diversity. About 200 languages are spoken in Brazil, and they are called minority languages because they are not the country’s official language[1,2]. In the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the presence of communities with speakers of immigrant minority languages - especially German and Italian - can be said to be quite significant. A bilingual individual is the one who has the ability to use two languages in social interactions, without necessarily having the same level of proficiency in them or equal performance at all language levels[3]
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