The organization of bilingual perceptual consonant space: English/Spanish bilingual perception of Malayalam nasal consonants

Abstract

This study examines the capacity of English/Spanish bilinguals to discriminate between consonants that exist in only one of their respective phonetic inventories. Two non-native nasal consonant contrasts were tested: dental versus alveolar and the palatal versus velar, both found in Malayalam. The dental and palatal nasals appear in Spanish, while the alveolar and velar nasals occur in English. Poorer performance in discrimination was interpreted as indicative of a common nasal category subsuming the Spanish dental and English alveolar nasals; better performance was taken as evidence of the maintenance of separate categories from both languages. Two other tests were administered to aid in the interpretation of the discrimination test scores: forced-choice identification and perceptual similarity ratings. The findings of this research will be used to characterize the perceptual consonant space in terms of continuum between two possible bilingual systems: one that collapses similar categories across languages or one that maintains two distinct phonological systems that can be accessed simultaneously. It is believed that bilinguals will be able to discriminate between these contrasts more consistently than their monolingual peers; however, there is no prediction about performance relative to the monolingual group from Malayalam.