title: Assessing the double phonemic representation in bilingual speakers of Spanish and English: an electrophysiological study.
abstract: Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from Spanish-English bilinguals (N=10) to test pre-attentive speech discrimination in two language contexts. ERPs were recorded while participants silently read magazines in English or Spanish. Two speech contrast conditions were recorded in each language context. In the phonemic in English condition, the speech sounds represented two different phonemic categories in English, but represented the same phonemic category in Spanish. In the phonemic in Spanish condition, the speech sounds represented two different phonemic categories in Spanish, but represented the same phonemic categories in English. Results showed pre-attentive discrimination when the acoustics/phonetics of the speech sounds match the language context (e.g., phonemic in English condition during the English language context). The results suggest that language contexts can affect pre-attentive auditory change detection. Specifically, bilinguals' mental processing of stop consonants relies on contextual linguistic information.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, United States. gasa@u.washington.edu
authors.forename: Adrián
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: García-Sierra
authors.forename: Nairán
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ramírez-Esparza
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Silva-Pereyra
authors.forename: Jennifer
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Siard
authors.forename: Craig A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Champlin
mesh_terms: D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D019303:Multilingualism; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult