The bilingual advantage in learning a novel accent: does specific language background modulate phonetic and phonological learning?

Abstract

Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in phonetic and phonological learning tasks (Tremblay and Sabourin, 2012; Antoniou et al., 2015; Spinu et al., 2018). Spinu et al. (2020) presented monolingual and bilingual participants (n = 36) with an artificial accent of English differing in four distinct ways from Standard American English: a vocalic change (diphthongization of a monophthong), consonantal change (tapping of intervocalic liquids), syllable structure change (epenthesis in s-clusters) and suprasegmental change (a novel intonation pattern in tag questions). Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals across the board but the differences were more pronounced with tapping and tag questions. Because the bilinguals’ other languages were diverse (Arabic, Cantonese, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Urdu, Thai, and Haitian/Jamaican/St. Lucian Creole), the authors concluded that the specific languages spoken by the participants did not greatly affect the outcome, and the observed advantage correlates with the state of being bilingual. In the current study, we explore the connection between specific language background and performance with each of the four novel features. We evaluate our findings against previous claims that phonetic learning is modulated by the degree of similarity between the phonologies existent in the bilinguals’ repertoire and the universal difficulty of the phonetic features learnt (Kopeckova, 2016).