Nonsense syllable perception by monolingual and bilingual English speakers

Abstract

Understanding speech in demanding environments is essential for daily communication. Previous research has shown that even highly proficient bilinguals may experience greater difficulty than monolinguals in understanding speech in noise. In the present study we further address this issue by examining the effects of varying task demand, fatigue, and practice on speech perception by bilinguals. One group of monolingual English listeners and three groups of Spanish–English bilinguals (bilingual since childhood, bilingual since teenager, and bilingual since adulthood) listened to nonsense syllables presented in noise and at increasing presentation rates. Listeners twice completed the two speech perception tasks on two days of testing. On one day the speech tasks were preceded by and on the other day followed by approximately 40 minutes of testing on nonspeech auditory tasks. Monolingual and bilingual listeners’ overall performance, their performance across the two days of testing (practice effect), and their performance across test orders (fatigue effect) will be compared. Preliminary results from two monolingual and two highly proficient bilinguals (bilingual since age 16 or earlier) show similar overall performance on both speech tasks and no effect of fatigue (test order), but suggest a greater practice effect for bilinguals’ perception of syllables in noise.