When Jack isn’t Jacques: Simultaneous opposite language-specific speech perceptual learning in French–English bilinguals

Abstract

Humans are remarkably good at understanding spoken language, despite the huge variability of the signal as a function of the talker, the situation, and the environment. This success relies on having access to stable representations based on years of speech input, coupled with the ability to adapt to short-term deviations from these norms, e.g. accented speech or speech altered by ambient noise. In the last two decades, there has been a robust research effort focused on a possible mechanism for adjusting to accented speech. In these studies, listeners typically hear 15 – 20 words in which a speech sound has been altered, creating a short-term deviation from its longer-term representation. After exposure to these items, listeners demonstrate “lexically driven phonetic recalibration”—they alter their categorization of speech sounds, expanding a speech category to take into account the recently heard deviations from their long-term representations. In the current study, we investigate such adjustments by bilingual listeners. French–English bilinguals were first exposed to nonstandard pronunciations of a sound (/s/ or /f/) in one language and tested for recalibration in both languages. Then, the exposure continued with both the original type of mispronunciation in the same language, plus mispronunciations in the other language, in the opposite direction. In a final test, we found simultaneous recalibration in opposite directions for the two languages— listeners shifted their French perception in one direction and their English in the other: Bilinguals can maintain separate adjustments, for the same sounds, when a talker’s speech differs across two languages.