Year: 2007
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: The present study investigates the hypothesis that bilinguals may produce a smaller intelligibility benefit than monolinguals when asked to speak clearly. Three groups of talkers were recorded: 13 monolingual native English speakers, 22 early Spanish-English bilinguals, with an age of onset of learning English (AOL) of 12 or earlier, and 14 later Spanish-English bilinguals, with an AOL of 15 or later. Talkers produced the target words ‘‘bead, bid, bayed, bed, bad’’ and ‘‘bod’’ in both clear and conversational speech styles. Two repetitions of each target word were mixed with noise and presented to monolingual English-speaking listeners in a six-alternative forced-choice task across two days of testing. Stimuli were also presented in quiet on two subsequent days of testing. In preliminary data from 13 listeners, the early bilinguals were slightly more intelligible in noise than the monolingual talkers, with both groups showing a similar degree of clear speech benefit. Later bilinguals were less intelligible overall and showed a much smaller clear speech benefit in noise. These data suggest that later bilinguals, but not early bilinguals, may experience a disadvantage when speaking in noise due to a reduced ability to improve intelligibility by speaking more clearly [Work supported by NIH].
DOI: 10.1121/1.4781733
Institution: University of South Florida
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2088025083