Bilinguals' comprehension of foreign-accented speech

Abstract

Foreign accents represent a common challenge to successful speech recognition, and while much has been uncovered about the factors contributing to the intelligibility of foreign-accented speech, most of it is based on data from monolingual listeners. There is good reason to believe, however, that bilinguals have a different experience when decoding foreign-accented speech: their two phonologies offer both greater flexibility in phonological-lexical mapping (Samuel and Larraza, 2015) but also greater lexical competition (Marian & Spivey, 2003). Further, they are known to perform more poorly than monolinguals in speech-in-noise comprehension (Rogers et al., 2006). Given these consequences of bilingualism, the current study compares the intelligibility of foreign-accented speech for monolingual listeners and simultaneous bilingual listeners. Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals performed a sentence repetition task for sentences produced by speakers of Mandarin-Chinese accented English with varying levels of proficiency in English. The competing hypotheses for this study are as follows: (1) because bilinguals' have a more flexible phonological-lexical mapping system, they will outperform the monolinguals in foreign-accented speech recognition; or, (2) greater lexical competition due to the bilinguals' L2 lexicon will result in poorer performance. The results will provide insight on bilingual sentence processing, and shed light on the shared and unique experiences of bilinguals and monolinguals.