Phoneme discrimination of an unrelated language: evidence for a narrow transfer but not a broad-based bilingual advantage

• Autores: Lawrence Patihis, Janet S. Oh, Tayopa Mogilner
• Localización: International Journal of Bilingualism: interdisciplinary studies of multilingual behaviour, ISSN 1367-0069, Vol. 19, Nº. 1, 2015, págs. 3-16
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This study examines monolingual and multilingual individuals' discrimination of stop consonants in a language to which they had never been exposed: Korean. If bilingualism leads to increased flexibility in phonological categorization, we may see a broad-based bilingual advantage for phoneme discrimination. Using a Korean phoneme discrimination task, we compared 56 adults in four groups: monolingual English, bilingual Spanish, bilingual Armenian, and trilingual. Findings indicate that Spanish-English bilingual individuals scored no better than English monolinguals, and lower than Armenian-English bilingual individuals. In this case, the advantage from early childhood non-English exposure or current bilingualism was found to be specific only to languages with similar phonemic categories. This supports a narrow first/second language to third language transfer view of phoneme discrimination skills.