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Perception Of American–English Vowels By Early And Late Spanish–English Bilinguals, Miriam Baigorri, Luca Campanelli, Erika S. Levy
Perception Of American–English Vowels By Early And Late Spanish–English Bilinguals, Miriam Baigorri, Luca Campanelli, Erika S. Levy
Publications and Research
Increasing numbers of Hispanic immigrants are entering the US and learning American–English (AE) as a second–language (L2). Previous studies investigating the relationship between AE and Spanish vowels have revealed an advantage for early L2 learners for their accuracy of L2 vowel perception. Replicating and extending such previous research, this study examined the patterns with which early and late Spanish–English bilingual adults assimilated naturally-produced AE vowels to their native vowel-inventory and the accuracy with which they discriminated the vowels. Twelve early Spanish–English bilingual, 12 late Spanish–English bilingual, and 10 monolingual listeners performed perceptual-assimilation and categorical-discrimination tasks involving AE /i,ɪ,ɛ,ʌ,æ,ɑ,o/. Early bilinguals …
Cultural Context As A Biasing Factor For Language Activation In Bilinguals, Matthias Berkes, Deanna Friesen, Ellen Bialystok
Cultural Context As A Biasing Factor For Language Activation In Bilinguals, Matthias Berkes, Deanna Friesen, Ellen Bialystok
Education Publications
Two studies investigated how cultural context and familiarity impact lexical access in Korean-English bilingual and English monolingual adults. ERPs were recorded while participants decided whether a word and picture matched or not. Pictures depicted versions of objects that were prototypically associated with North American or Korean culture and named in either English or Korean, creating culturally congruent and incongruent trials. For bilinguals, culturally congruent trials facilitated responding but ERP results showed that images from both cultures were processed similarly. For monolinguals, culturally incongruent pairs produced longer RTs and larger N400s than congruent items, indicating more effortful processing. Thus, an unfamiliar …