Developing automaticity in neural speech discrimination in typically developing bilingual Italian-German and...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Linguistics

Background:

• Bilingualism impacts children's phonemic development.
• Understanding how bilingual children process speech sounds is crucial for developmental research.
• Voice Onset Time (VOT) perception varies across languages, presenting unique challenges for bilinguals.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the neural processes underlying Voice Onset Time (VOT) perception in bilingual Italian-German children.
• To compare the VOT perception abilities of bilingual children with their monolingual German peers.
• To explore the influence of bilingual language input on the development of phonetic/phonological categories.

Main Methods:

• Utilized an oddball design to elicit the neural Mismatch Response (MMR).
• Tested 5-year-old children (16 monolingual German, 24 bilingual Italian-German).
• Presented bilabial stop VOT contrasts, including German (long-lag) and Italian (voicing lead) specific contrasts.

Main Results:

• Both bilingual and monolingual children showed similar neural responses to German long-lag and Italian voicing lead VOT.
• Bilingual children did not exhibit a robust Mismatch Response (MMR) to a 36 ms long-lag VOT, an acoustically challenging distinction.
• No significant difference was observed between bilinguals and monolinguals for voicing lead perception.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that bilingual children's neural processing of VOT is influenced by their language input.
• The amount of Italian input may not have been sufficient to confer a perceptual advantage in bilinguals.
• Alternatively, the results might indicate that voicing lead is inherently easier to discriminate than voicing lag.