Effects of multilingual and monolingual social networks on speech perception

Abstract

Speech perception is gradient—listeners track continuous acoustic differences within a category (McMurray et al., 2022; Kapnoula & McMurray, 2022). Listeners use this gradiency to adjust subphonetic details (McMurray & Jongman, 2011), recover from ambiguity (McMurray et al., 2009), and aid learning and adaptation (McMurray & Farris-Trimble, 2012; Clayards et al., 2008). However, it is unclear whether gradiency is a developmental product of linguistic experience, particularly the variability of speech that is experienced. This ongoing project (current n = 31, planned n = 60) is testing school-aged children (6–11 years old) using the visual analogue scaling task (Kong & Edwards, 2011). Children hear tokens from a speech continuum (e.g., beach/peach) and make continuous ratings about how /b/- or /p/- like the sound is. This is related to social network information regarding children’s language and social background. Preliminary results suggest that linguistic diversity impacts speech perception gradiency. The implications of bilingual education and linguistic environment in development will be discussed.