The effects of social manipulation of talkers on heritage bilingual speech perception

Abstract

The social information listeners are given about a talker affects their perception. For example, when speech is embedded in noise, L1 English listeners are more likely to accurately perceive a talker when they are told the talker is a native versus non-native speaker, even though it is the same acoustic signal across the two conditions. Among other factors, this effect has been attributed to listeners (inappropriately) relying on prior experiences rather than the acoustic information, and/or listeners devoting less attention to speech when listening to stigmatized accents. The current study examines whether this social information similarly impacts English-dominant Spanish heritage bilinguals’ perceptual processes. 112 Mexican-American Spanish heritage bilinguals transcribed speech in noise in English-only and Spanish-only blocks. In each block, there were two talkers of different genders associated with native or non-native social information. Results show that listeners perform significantly better in their dominant language, however, did not reliably perform better when told a talker was a native speaker of the language they were perceiving. This suggests heritage bilingual listeners adopt a different approach to heritage bilingual speakers, relying more on the acoustic signal and/or better attending to speech (reflecting a lack of stigmatization of L2 speech or talker-listener alignment).