2006/10/11

Bürki-Cohen, J., Grosjean, F., & Miller, J. L. (1989). Base-language effects on word identification in bilingual speech: evidence from categorical perception experiments. Language and Speech, 32(4), 355–371.

Presentation: Chris
Summary: Renee

The study used a categorical perception paradigm to investigate whether French-English bilinguals categorize a code-switched word as French or English according to the acoustic-phonetic information alone or the base-language context where the word occurs. Both experiments required the subjects to identify stimuli as English or French. In Experiment 1, two sets of English and French words were chosen as endpoints. Two series of computer-edited hybrid stimuli were constructed. The results indicate that subjects divide hybrid words into sharply defined categories and discriminate best those stimuli which they categorize differently. In Experiment 2, two sets of English and French context sentences similar in meaning and length were chosen. Two series of spliced stimuli were also constructed. Unlike what was predicted, the results showed that the base-language had a contrastive effect on categorization of the stimuli. In summary, although the assimilative effect of the base-language with the categorical perception paradigm was not reproduced from the experiments, the base-language context does, under certain conditions, affect the identification of a code-switched word. Furthermore, this base-language effect interacts with the acoustic-phonetic nature of the code-switched word.