Cross-linguistic phonetic recalibration in bilingual lexical processing
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.The study explores phonetic recalibration as a novel method for investigating sound-category linkages across languages, by examining cross-linguistic generalization of phoneme retuning among Spanish–English bilinguals (n = 127). Participants were trained to recalibrate the perceptual boundary between /p/ and /k/ in one of their languages, English or Spanish, via a lexical decision task which included words with acoustically manipulated /p/ or /k/. Recalibration was subsequently tested via an identification task in both of participants’ languages, thus determining whether recalibration generalized to the untrained language. The results revealed asymmetric generalization patterns. While recalibration always occurred in the trained language, it transferred to the untrained language only in the direction of English to Spanish, but not Spanish to English, suggesting that L1 and L2 sound categories were asymmetrically linked. We discuss possible explanations for this asymmetry, including the language dominance profile of our participants. These findings expand significantly on the previous cross-linguistic recalibration research due to two methodological innovations. First, recalibration generalized across phonetically distinct categories: voiceless aspirated stops in English and voiceless unaspirated stops in Spanish. Second, generalization across languages could not be attributed to speaker-specific learning, since our cross-language training and testing stimuli were produced by different speakers.
Authors: Yuhyeon Seo, Olga Dmitrieva
Institution: State University of New York at Oswego
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $551
OpenAlex ID: W4415976788