How bilinguals listen in noise: linguistic and non-linguistic factors

• JENNIFER KRIZMAN ^[1] ; ANN R. BRADLOW ^[1] ; SILVIA SIU-YIN LAM ^[1] ; NINA KRAUS ^[1]
  1. [1] Northwestern University

     Northwestern University

     Township of Evanston, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Bilingualism: Language and cognition, ISSN 1366-7289, Vol. 20, Nº 4, 2017, págs. 834-843
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Bilinguals are known to perform worse than monolinguals on speech-in-noise tests. However, the mechanisms underlying this difference are unclear. By varying the amount of linguistic information available in the target stimulus across five auditory-perception-in-noise tasks, we tested if differences in language-independent (sensory/cognitive) or language-dependent (extracting linguistic meaning) processing could account for this disadvantage. We hypothesized that language-dependent processing differences underlie the bilingual disadvantage and predicted that it would manifest on perception-in-noise tasks that use linguistic stimuli. We found that performance differences between bilinguals and monolinguals varied with the linguistic processing demands of each task: early, high-proficiency, Spanish–English bilingual adolescents performed worse than English monolingual adolescents when perceiving sentences, similarly when perceiving words, and better when perceiving tones in noise. This pattern suggests that bottlenecks in language-dependent processing underlie the bilingual disadvantage while language-independent perception-in-noise processes are enhanced.