Monolingual and bilingual children's processing of coarticulation cues during spoken word recognition

Abstract

Bilingual children cope with a significant amount of phonetic variability when processing speech, and must learn to weigh phonetic cues differently depending on the cues’ respective roles in their two languages. For example, vowel nasalization is coarticulatory and contrastive in French, but coarticulatory-only in English. In this study, we extended an investigation of the processing of coarticulation in two- to three-year-old English monolingual children (Zamuner, Moore & Desmeules-Trudel, 2016) to a group of four- to six-year-old English monolingual children and age-matched English–French bilingual children. Using eye tracking, we found that older monolingual children and age-matched bilingual children showed more sensitivity to coarticulation cues than the younger children. Moreover, when comparing the older monolinguals and bilinguals, we found no statistical differences between the two groups. These results offer support for the specification of coarticulation in word representations, and indicate that, in some cases, bilingual children possess language processing skills similar to monolinguals.

Developmental change in children’s speech processing of auditory and visual cues: An eyetracking study

“…On the other hand, when considering all stimuli in 1-year age chunks, we observed a gradual development in processing of visual speech cues (rather than a U-shaped curve). This is compatible with work showing that word recognition skills continue to develop over childhood (Desmeules-Trudel, Moore & Zamuner, 2020;Rigler, Farris-Trimble, Greiner, Walker, Tomblin & McMurray, 2015). Furthermore, since both looking to the mouth in V-only modality and looking to the target images across all speech modalities increased with age, our results show continuity between younger learners and older children's visual speech processing, and and our results support previous research suggesting that sensory dominance shifts from auditory to visual across development (Hirst et al, 2018).…”

Developmental differences in perceptual anticipation underlie different sensitivities to coarticulatory dynamics

“…It further indicates that if a developmental shift occurs in children's attention to signal properties, seven-year-old child listeners at least behaved in similar ways as adults. Furthermore, our finding suggests that children at this age can use sub-phonemic information and that their phonetic representations are already fine-grained (e.g., Cross & Joanisse, 2018; Desmeules-Trudel, Moore & Zamuner, 2020).…”

Spoken word recognition in a second language: The importance of phonetic details

“…GAMMs also handle missing data points, which are common in eye-tracking research since listeners are free to look away from the images on the display at any point. Recent accounts that use GAMMs for psycholinguistic research include Desmeules-Trudel et al (2020) , Desmeules-Trudel and Zamuner (2019) , Porretta et al (2016 , 2017 ), Tremblay and Newman (2015) , van Rij et al (2016) , amongst others. We refer the reader to Porretta et al, (2017) for a comprehensive review and tutorial to fit GAMMs on eye-tracking data.…”

“…coarticulation (e.g. Beddor et al, 2013 ; Cross and Joanisse, 2018 ; Dahan et al, 2001 ; Desmeules-Trudel et al, 2020 ; Paquette-Smith et al, 2016 ; Zamuner et al, 2016 ) and within-category variability ( Desmeules-Trudel and Zamuner, 2019 ; McMurray et al, 2002 , 2008 ). The current article investigates the interplay between fine-grained speech processing and real-time word recognition in an L2.…”

“…duration of nasalization). Previous eye-tracking research has found that English listeners are able to use coarticulatory nasalization to recognize spoken words in their L1 (American English, Beddor et al, 2013 ; Canadian English, Desmeules-Trudel et al, 2020 ; Zamuner et al, 2016 ). Some differences across American and Canadian English have been underlined in the literature on vowel nasalization ( Rochet and Rochet, 1999 ), but are expected to be minor in the current study since all L2 listeners spoke Canadian English as an L1.…”