The cognitive demands of adverse listening conditions for monolingual and bilingual listeners: A pupillometry study

Abstract

Bilinguals typically underperform relative to monolinguals in speech-perception-in-noise tasks. However, there is little data comparing bilinguals and monolinguals in other types of difficult listening conditions. Furthermore, such differences are typically investigated using off-line intelligibility accuracy scores, which do not necessarily reflect differences in on-line speech processing. In the current study, pupillometry was used during sentence recognition tasks to index cognitive processing load. Monolingual English listeners and English-dominant simultaneous bilingual listeners heard English sentences in four conditions: American-Accented in Quiet, Turkish-Accented in Quiet, American-Accented in Noise, and Face Mask-Attenuated American-Accented in Quiet. Differences in pupil dilation between groups are expected in the latter three conditions. Data collection is on-going, but preliminary results (N = 40) show bilinguals exert more cognitive effort than monolinguals across all conditions.