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Sketchpad Series

Language Experience and Top-Down Prediction in Bilingual Phoneme Perception.

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Sarah Wang¹ (ssiwang@ucdavis.edu), Agnes Gao^1,2, Tamara Swaab¹; ¹University of California, Davis, ²Gunma University

This study investigates how second language experience influences phonological prediction during speech perception in bilinguals. Specifically, we examine whether Spanish-English heritage speakers and English-dominant late learners of Spanish rely on top-down predictions or bottom-up perceptual processing to categorize phonemes during word recognition. Participants (N = 40 per group) will be tested in two experiments with monolingual English and monolingual Spanish contexts. They will complete a two-word priming paradigm in which a visual prime is followed by an auditory target word that begins with a voiced or voiceless plosive consonant (/b/, /p/, /d/, /t/, /g/, /k/). Voice Onset Time (VOT), the time between the release of a plosive consonant and the onset of vocal fold vibration, serves as a key cue for distinguishing voiced and voiceless consonants. VOT durations differ systematically between Spanish and English: in Spanish, voiced plosives have VOTs starting before 0 ms, while in English, voicing begins later. Participants will perform a phoneme categorization task, identifying the first consonant of the target word. The experiment manipulates semantic relatedness (Related, Unrelated) and VOT (Voiced, Ambiguous, Voiceless). We will use Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and analyze auditory N1 and N400 components. The N1, sensitive to VOT duration, is expected to reflect participants’ reliance on predictive context versus bottom-up acoustic cues, while the N400, sensitive to semantic relatedness, will indicate the facilitative effects of prediction on word recognition. Findings will provide insights into bilinguals’ use of top-down predictions and bottom-up cues across their dominant and less-dominant languages.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic