The Language-Specificity of Phonetic Adaptation to Talkers.
Anne Cutler, L Ann Burchfield, Mark Antoniou
PMID 38054422WHAT IT FOUND
Bilingual listeners' ability to adjust to a talker's unusual pronunciation differed by language: English speakers learning Mandarin adjusted in both English and Mandarin, Mandarin speakers adjusted in Mandarin but not reliably in English.
Key findings
01After hearing an ambiguous /f/-/s/ sound in words, Australian English speakers learning Mandarin showed training-consistent perceptual learning in both English and Mandarin.
02Mandarin-native listeners showed training-consistent perceptual learning in Mandarin, but there was no evidence of learning in English.
03When English words ended with the ambiguous fricative, Mandarin-native listeners again showed learning in Mandarin, while the English effect was only marginal.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The analysed groups were small: 30 participants in Experiment 1, 28 in Experiment 2, and 25 in Experiment 3. The authors say the sample sizes were smaller than they had hoped, although they judged the pattern reliable. Participants were healthy bilingual adults or students, not people with communication disorders. Experiment 2 included only female participants. The task was a laboratory phoneme categorisation test with an ambiguous sound embedded in words, not everyday conversation or clinical communication. The study did not identify why perceptual learning failed in some languages.
Declared interests
The research was supported by the Australian Research Council (Grant DP140104389, with additional contributions from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language CE140100041 and DE150101053).
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the result as evidence that bilingual clients have a general listening impairment when they do not adapt to an unfamiliar talker in a second language. The study tested a laboratory sound categorisation task in healthy bilingual adults, and it did not test everyday communication or clinical outcomes.