Heritage speaker children’s speech categorization patterns

Abstract

Bi-/multilingual experiences vary widely due to differing degrees of input frequency, dominancy in languages, and societal preferences for the language(s) used. Heritage bilingualism has received notable attention over the last decade. Heritage bilinguals are those who often use or are exposed to one language at home (the heritage language) that differs from that used outside of the home (the majority language). For a long time, bilingual children’s unbalanced input was targeted as a source of deficiency in categorizing speech. However, prior studies used tasks that were not equipped to address variability in speech categorization across listeners (see Apfelbaum et al., 2022). We use the visual analogue scaling (VAS) task which can capture variability in speech categorization across listeners with more sensitivity and which can reveal new dimensions of differences such as the trial-by-trial variability in responding (Kapnoula et al., 2017; Kutlu et al., 2022). In an ongoing study, we are testing school-aged bilingual children with various heritage language backgrounds (n = 30, 6–11 years). Preliminary findings suggest that heritage speaker children are not deficient in speech categorization, and in fact, show more gradient categorization patterns, suggesting a functional adaptation to increased phonetic variation in their language environment (Kutlu et al., 2022).