Presentation: Sarah
Summary: Sally
This paper aimed to investigate whether a unilingual or bilingual
context of speech would
influence the acoustic characteristics of sounds produced and discriminated by
highly proficient bilingual speakers. Two types of interference in Grosjean’s framework
(2011), static and dynamic, were examined. The former is a long-term inference truly
inherent to speakers and has been extensively studied, whereas the latter
changes with individual communicative settings and is yet to be explored. In
this study, one perception and one production and experiment were included. Three
groups of highly proficient Catalan-Spanish bilinguals were classified by their
Spanish dominance based on the scores of the Bilingual Language Profile
(Birdsong et al., 2012). They were tested for the Catalan /o/-/ɔ/ vowel
contrast along with the similar Spanish vowel /o/ in two separate sessions, one
unilingual and the other bilingual. Results of the perception study showed that
the Catalan-dominant group discriminated the Catalan vowel contrast more accurately
than the other two groups, but the difference between moderately and strongly
Spanish-dominant bilinguals were not significant due to large individual
differences. The effect of Spanish dominance on the perception of the Catalan
vowel contrast seemed to be categorical. In terms of production, all three groups
showed acoustic differences between the two Catalan mid-back vowels, and the
magnitude negatively correlated with Spanish dominance. The effect of Spanish
dominance on the production of the Catalan vowel contrast appeared to be
gradient. In addition, the Catalan /o/ differed from Spanish /o/ in the
unilingual session, but not in the bilingual session. The presence of Spanish
words did trigger the acoustic distribution of the two Catalan vowels toward the
corresponding Spanish vowel, which supported the view of the dynamic/transient effects in interlingual
interferences.
