Limits on bilingualism revisited: stress 'deafness' in simultaneous French-Spanish bilinguals.
We probed simultaneous French-Spanish bilinguals for the perception of Spanish lexical stress using three tasks, two short-term memory encoding tasks and a speeded lexical decision. In all three tasks, the performance of the group of simultaneous bilinguals was intermediate between that of native speakers of Spanish on the one hand and French late learners of Spanish on the other hand. Using a composite stress 'deafness' index measure computed over the results of the three tasks, we found that the performance of the simultaneous bilinguals is best fitted by a bimodal distribution that corresponds to a mixture of the performance distributions of the two control groups. Correlation analyses showed that the variables explaining language dominance are linked to early language exposure. These findings are discussed in light of theories of language processing in bilinguals.
Dupoux
Emmanuel
E
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 29 Rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France.
Peperkamp
Sharon
S
Sebastián-Gallés
Núria
N
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003638:Deafness / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007802:Language; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D019303:Multilingualism; D011247:Pregnancy; D013030:Spain; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult