Perceptual switching in bilinguals

Abstract

Three groups of subjects, monolingual English speakers, monolingual Spanish speakers, and English-Spanish bilinguals, identified a series of naturally-produced syllables which varied in voice-onset time (from /ba/ to /pa/). The two monolingual groups differed substantially in their identification performance with English speakers tending to label most of the syllables as /ba/ and Spanish speakers tending to label most of them as /pa/. The bilingual subjects heard the test stimuli in both an English and a Spanish context, each designed to induce a particular language “set”. These subjects perceived a reliably greater number of the test items as /ba/ in the English context than in the Spanish. The magnitude of this perceptual switching effect depends on the listener's degree of bilingualism.