Phonetic variation in bilingual speech: A lens for studying the production–comprehension link

Abstract

We exploit the unique phonetic properties of bilingual speech to ask how processes occurring during planning affect speech articulation, and whether listeners can use the phonetic modulations that occur in anticipation of a codeswitch to help restrict their lexical search to the appropriate language. An analysis of spontaneous bilingual codeswitching in the Bangor Miami Corpus (Deuchar et al., 2014) reveals that in anticipation of switching languages, Spanish-English bilinguals produce slowed speech rate and cross-language phonological influence on consonant voice onset time. A study of speech comprehension using the visual world paradigm demonstrates that bilingual listeners can indeed exploit these low-level phonetic cues to anticipate that a codeswitch is coming and to suppress activation of the non-target language. We discuss the implications of these results for current theories of bilingual language regulation, and situate them in terms of recent proposals relating the coupling of the production and comprehension systems more generally.

Didn't hear that coming: Effects of withholding phonetic cues to code-switching

“…For instance, Fricke, Kroll and Dussias (2016) report subtle shifts in voice onset time (VOT) before an English-to-Spanish code-switch, while Piccinini and Garellek (2014) report subtle shifts in intonation prior to code-switches in either direction. They further found that bilingual listeners use shifts in VOT and intonation as cues to anticipate code-switches.…”

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Code-switching has been found to incur a processing cost in auditory comprehension. However, listeners may have access to anticipatory phonetic cues to code-switches (Piccinini & Garellek, 2014;Fricke et al, 2016), thus mitigating switch cost. We investigated effects of withholding anticipatory phonetic cues on code-switched word recognition by splicing English-to-Mandarin code-switches into unilingual English sentences.

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Examining the relationship between comprehension and production processes in code-switched language

“…Cues can be present at multiple linguistic levels. For example, they exist as subtle low-level cues, such as slight changes in VOT before a code-switch (e.g., Balukas & Koops, 2015; Fricke, Kroll, & Dussias, 2016) and slow speech rate (Fricke et al, 2016); they may also be discourse-driven such that certain topics are more likely than others to elicit code-switches (e.g., Myers-Scotton, 1993). In addition, code-switches may be used as a strategy among bilinguals to more saliently encode for meanings of low predictability and high information content (Myslín & Levy, 2015).…”

Patterns of Short-Term Phonetic Interference in Bilingual Speech

“…One-direction interpreting, however, also requires that only single-language utterances are produced, that is, no articulation of L1 sounds takes place. Thus, local phonetic interference of the kind observed in code-switching (e.g., Bullock et al 2006;Fricke et al 2016;Olson 2016a), whether anticipatory-i.e., induced by accessing post-switch phonetic forms while planning articulation of a pre-switch unit-or carry-over due to transfer of articulatory settings at the switch juncture, cannot occur. The phonetic cognate effect, evidenced in single-language psycholinguistic experiments, is also less likely in online Czech-to-English interpreting since, in general, the number of Czech-English cognates is limited and since specifically for the purposes of the current study, cognates were excluded.…”