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Related Experiment Video

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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Published on: September 27, 2024

Bilingualism affects audiovisual phoneme identification.

Sabine Burfin¹, Olivier Pascalis¹, Elisa Ruiz Tada²

¹LPNC (CNRS UMR 5105) - Université Grenoble Alpes Grenoble, France.

Frontiers in Psychology

|November 7, 2014

Summary

Adults lose the ability to distinguish non-native speech sounds as they learn a language. This study shows that while visual cues help both bilinguals and monolinguals identify foreign phonemes, monolinguals perform better, suggesting different visual processing strategies.

Keywords:

audiovisual speech bilinguals monolinguals phonological deafness

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Audiovisual Speech Perception
Phonetics

Background:

Perceptual narrowing impacts phoneme identification, reducing the ability to distinguish non-native sounds.
Linguistic experience, particularly early bilingualism, shapes phonological inventories and perception.
Understanding how visual cues influence non-native phoneme perception is crucial for speech processing research.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the effect of linguistic experience on visual processes in non-native phoneme identification.
To compare audiovisual and audio-only speech perception in monolingual and bilingual adults for a non-native phoneme contrast.
To explore differences in visual speech decoding strategies between monolinguals and bilinguals.

Main Methods:

An ABX phoneme identification task was administered to adult monolingual and bilingual participants.
A Bengali dental-retroflex phoneme contrast, absent in participants' native languages, was used.
Stimuli were presented in both audiovisual (AV) and audio-only (A) conditions.

Main Results:

In audio-only conditions, both groups struggled with the non-native retroflex phoneme, showing phonological 'deafness'.
Audiovisual presentation enabled both groups to identify the non-native phonemes, overcoming audio limitations.
Monolinguals demonstrated higher accuracy and faster response times than bilinguals in the audiovisual condition.

Conclusions:

Visual speech cues can mitigate phonological deafness for non-native phonemes in both monolinguals and bilinguals.
Monolinguals and bilinguals may employ distinct cognitive processes for decoding visual speech.
Linguistic background significantly influences the integration of auditory and visual information in speech perception.