2006/12/27

Sebastian-Galles, N. & Soto-Faraco S. (1999). Online processing of native and non-native phonemic contrasts in early bilinguals. Cognition, 74, 111–123.

Presentation: Sally
Summary: Angela

The authors tried to find out whether high proficiency L2 speakers could discern L2 phonemic contrasts as well as L1 speakers could. To achieve this goal, the authors utilized a gating task to test two groups of Catalan-Spanish bilingual subjects. One group was Spanish-dominant, and the other was Catalan-dominant. The subjects’ task was to choose between two alternative forms of the following vowels and consonants: /e/-/E/, /o/-open /o/, /s/-/z/ and ash-yogh. It was predicted that since the distinctions do not occur in Spanish, the Spanish-dominant bilinguals should perform worse than the Catalan-dominant bilinguals. The results confirmed the authors’ prediction. As shown, the Spanish-dominant bilinguals on average had a lower score in identifying the pairs. In addition, for those Spanish-dominant bilinguals who identified the pairs correctly, their average RT was longer compared to the Catalan-dominant bilinguals. Thus, the result supported the hypothesis that L1 shapes the human perceptual system so deeply that it will also determine the perception of non-native sounds.