BALANCED BILINGUALS HAVE ONE INTERTWINED PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM

Maija S. Peltola, Henna Tamminen, Heidi Lehtola & Olli Aaltonen
Department of Phonetics and the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience

ID 1184
[full paper]

Speech sound perception is based on automatically responding neural memory traces. In order to see, whether balanced bilinguals have two separate phonological systems, which can be activated in accordance with the linguistic context, we performed discrimination tasks and recorded the mismatch negativity (MMN) response from 12 Finnish-Swedish bilinguals in both linguistic contexts. Our results suggest that vowels are perceived by an intertwined phonological system, which includes the representations for the phonological categories of both languages. This system is triggered equally efficiently by both languages.

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