Schedule of Events | Symposia

Continuous Speech Comprehension in Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers

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

Haoyin Xu¹ (hyx002@ucsd.edu), Seana Coulson¹; ¹University of California, San Diego

Research has shown that bilingual speakers experience greater difficulties than monolinguals in producing and comprehending low frequency words. However, traditional laboratory tasks were used in most earlier studies, raising questions about its generalizability to real world settings. Here, we investigated how bilingual language experience influences neural tracking of naturalistic continuous speech materials. Specifically, we examine whether differences in speech tracking and word frequency sensitivity between monolingual and bilingual speakers arise from language fluency or language experience (i.e. Monolingual vs. Bilingual). EEG data were recorded from 28 healthy subjects (13 monolingual, 15 bilingual speakers) as they watched excerpts of Ted Talks. Throughout the experiments, the clips alternated between audio-only and audiovisual modalities. EEG data were analyzed using the temporal response function (TRF) method to decode audio envelope and word frequency tracking performance, yielding a reconstruction accuracy score for each participant. These scores were then analyzed with mixed effect models to explore the relationship between language experience, stimulus modality and neural tracking. Analysis of audio envelope reconstruction revealed that both speaker groups exhibited better audio envelope tracking in audiovisual than audio-only modalities (estimates = 0.11, CI = [0.06, 0.15]). Analysis of word frequency reconstruction scores showed that bilinguals exhibited marginally better tracking of word frequency than monolinguals (estimates: 0.10, CI: [-0.01, 0.21]), regardless of stimulus modality. These findings suggest that visual input facilitates speech perception in both speaker groups. In addition, consistent with previous behavioral findings, bilinguals are more sensitive to word frequencies in naturalistic materials.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic