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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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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2025
Second language knowledge can influence native language performance in exclusively native contexts: An approximate replication of Van Hell & Dijkstra (2002)
Abstract Over the past decades, bilingualism researchers have come to a consensus around a fairly strong view of nonselectivity in bilingual speakers, often citing Van Hell and Dijkstra (2002) as a critical piece of support for this position. Given the study’s continuing relevance to bilingualism and its strong test of the influence of a bilingual’s second language on their first language, we conducted an approximate replication of the lexical decision experiments in the original study (Experiments 2 and 3) using the same tasks and—to the extent possible—the same stimuli. Unlike the original study, our replication was conducted online with Dutch–English bilinguals (rather than in a lab with Dutch–English–French trilinguals). Despite these differences, results overall closely replicated the pattern of cognate facilitation effects observed in the original study. We discuss the replication of outcomes and possible interpretations of subtle differences in outcomes and make recommendations for future extensions of this line of research.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2125865
- PAR ID:
- 10631320
- Publisher / Repository:
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Studies in Second Language Acquisition
- Volume:
- 46
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0272-2631
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1457 to 1474
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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