The role of sensorimotor mechanisms in phonetic and phonological learning

Abstract

Phonetic and phonological learning was reported to be enhanced in bilinguals; however, the underlying mechanisms remain understudied. Prior work suggests a bilingual advantage in articulatory skill and auditory sensory memory, raising the question of the involvement of sensorimotor functions in phonetic and phonological learning. To explore this relationship, we compare the performance of English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals on three tasks:(1) Articulatory skill, using a novel sound learning task with articulatory complex sounds not present in our participants' inventory.(2) Auditory sensory memory, measured via an adaptive digit span task. (3) Phonetic and phonological learning, using an artificial accent of English displaying diphthongization of mid-front lax vowels and tapping of intervocalic liquids. All tasks were conducted online 1-on-1 via Zoom. Tasks 1 and 3 were scored based on four listeners' perceptual judgments. For Task 2, we obtained response accuracy and input-output similarity scores. While data analysis is currently underway, preliminary findings replicate the previously observed bilingual advantage in phonological learning and auditory sensory memory and reveal a correlation between them. Bringing together motor, sensory, and acquisitional components and investigating the ways in which they are related adds to lesser explored mechanisms potentially underlying the bilingual advantage.