Matching the Mismatch: The interaction between perceptual and conceptual cues in bilinguals’ speech perception

Abstract

AbstractSpeech perception involves both conceptual cues and perceptual cues. These, individually, have been shown to guide bilinguals’ speech perception; but their potential interaction has been ignored. Explicitly, bilinguals have been given perceptual cues that could be predicted by the conceptual cues. Therefore, to target the perceptual-conceptual interaction, we created a restricted range of perceptual cues that either matched, or mismatched, bilinguals’ conceptual predictions based on the language context. Specifically, we designed an active speech perception task that concurrently collected electrophysiological data from Spanish–English bilinguals and English monolinguals to address the extent to which this cue interaction uniquely affects bilinguals’ speech sound perception and allocation of attentional resources. Bilinguals’ larger MMN-N2b in the mismatched context aligns with the Predictive Coding Hypothesis to suggest that bilinguals use their diverse perceptual routines to best allocate cognitive resources to perceive speech.