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Learning to process speech in a foreign language involves learning new representations for mapping the auditory signal to linguistic structure. Behavioral experiments suggest that even listeners that are highly proficient in a non-native language experience interference from representations of their native language. However, much of the evidence for such interference comes from tasks that may inadvertently increase the salience of native language competitors. Here we tested for neural evidence of proficiency and native language interference in a naturalistic story listening task. We studied electroencephalography responses of 39 native speakers of Dutch (14 male) to an English short story, spoken by a native speaker of either American English or Dutch. We modeled brain responses with multivariate temporal response functions, using acoustic and language models. We found evidence for activation of Dutch language statistics when listening to English, but only when it was spoken with a Dutch accent. This suggests that a naturalistic, monolingual setting decreases the interference from native language representations, whereas an accent in the listener's own native language may increase native language interference, by increasing the salience of the native language and activating native language phonetic and lexical representations. Brain responses suggest that such interference stems from words from the native language competing with the foreign language in a single word recognition system, rather than being activated in a parallel lexicon. We further found that secondary acoustic representations of speech (after 200 ms latency) decreased with increasing proficiency. This may reflect improved acoustic–phonetic models in more proficient listeners. Significance StatementBehavioral experiments suggest that native language knowledge interferes with foreign language listening, but such effects may be sensitive to task manipulations, as tasks that increase metalinguistic awareness may also increase native language interference. This highlights the need for studying non-native speech processing using naturalistic tasks. We measured neural responses unobtrusively while participants listened for comprehension and characterized the influence of proficiency at multiple levels of representation. We found that salience of the native language, as manipulated through speaker accent, affected activation of native language representations: significant evidence for activation of native language (Dutch) categories was only obtained when the speaker had a Dutch accent, whereas no significant interference was found to a speaker with a native (American) accent.
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Language of instruction affects language interference in the third language
Abstract Applied linguistic work claims that multilinguals’ non-native languages interfere with one another based on similarities in cognitive factors like proficiency or age of acquisition. Two experiments explored how trilinguals regulate control of native- and non-native-language words. Experiment 1 tested 46 Dutch–English–French trilinguals in a monitoring task. Participants decided if phonemes were present in the target language name of a picture, phonemes of non-target language translations resulted in longer response times and more false alarms compared to phonemes not present in any translation (Colomé, 2001). The second language (English) interfered more than the first (Dutch) when trilinguals monitored in their third language (French). In Experiment 2, 95 bilinguals learned an artificial language to explore the possibility that the language from which a bilingual learns a third language provides practice managing known-language interference. Language of instruction modulated results, suggesting that learning conditions may reduce interference effects previously attributed to cognitive factors.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1923065
- PAR ID:
- 10287399
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1366-7289
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 707 to 718
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000043
