No abstract

Bilingualism has been associated with cognitive disadvantages (compared to monolinguals) in terms of lexical retrieval, even in bilinguals' native language. According to Gollan et al. (2002), a possible source of the disadvantages is cross-language interference. Another potential explanation is that bilinguals process even their first language differently from monolinguals. Higby et al. (2013) suggest that, to understand the advantages and disadvantages of multilingualism, one must consider the linguistic system as a whole and how effective management of more than one language affects all aspects of cognition, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. Our experimental study includes two tasks: a lexical decision task in which participants are shown a single word and have to decide whether it is a real word, and the web-based word game Wordle, which provides six attempts at guessing a 5-letter word. Each participant was tested individually and recorded via Zoom under 1-on-1 supervision, sharing their screen throughout the process. Our measures include reaction times for the lexical decision task, and overall duration, number of trials required to arrive at a correct answer, and accuracy for Wordle. Based on previous findings, we hypothesize slower lexical decision reaction times in bilinguals but higher performance on the word game.

Bilingualism has been linked with improved function regarding certain aspects of linguistic processing, e.g., novel word acquisition and learning unfamiliar sound patterns. Two non mutually-exclusive approaches might explain these results. One is related to executive function, speculating that more effective learning is achieved through actively choosing relevant information while inhibiting potentially interfering information. While still controversial, executive function enhancements attributed to bilingual experience have been reported for decades. The other approach, understudied to date, emphasizes the role of sensory mechanisms, specifically auditory sensory memory. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in tasks involving auditory processing and episodic memory recall, but the questions whether (1) bilinguals’ auditory sensory memory skills are also enhanced, and (2) phonetic skill and auditory sensory memory are correlated, remain open, however. Our study is innovative in investigating phonetic learning skills and auditory sensory memory in the same speakers from two groups: monolinguals and early bilinguals. The participants were trained and tested on an artificial accent of English and their auditory sensory memory was assessed based on a digit span task. The results demonstrated that, compared to monolinguals, bilinguals exhibit enhanced auditory sensory memory and phonetic and phonological learning skill, and a correlation exists between them.

Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in phonetic and phonological learning tasks (Tremblay and Sabourin, 2012; Antoniou et al., 2015; Spinu et al., 2018). Spinu et al. (2020) presented monolingual and bilingual participants (n = 36) with an artificial accent of English differing in four distinct ways from Standard American English: a vocalic change (diphthongization of a monophthong), consonantal change (tapping of intervocalic liquids), syllable structure change (epenthesis in s-clusters) and suprasegmental change (a novel intonation pattern in tag questions). Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals across the board but the differences were more pronounced with tapping and tag questions. Because the bilinguals’ other languages were diverse (Arabic, Cantonese, Hebrew, Russian, Spanish, Urdu, Thai, and Haitian/Jamaican/St. Lucian Creole), the authors concluded that the specific languages spoken by the participants did not greatly affect the outcome, and the observed advantage correlates with the state of being bilingual. In the current study, we explore the connection between specific language background and performance with each of the four novel features. We evaluate our findings against previous claims that phonetic learning is modulated by the degree of similarity between the phonologies existent in the bilinguals’ repertoire and the universal difficulty of the phonetic features learnt (Kopeckova, 2016).