Assessing the double phonemic representation in bilingual speakers of Spanish and English: An electrophysiological study

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.

► We examine speech perception of bilinguals speakers of Spanish and English.
► Phonemic boundaries of bilinguals were tested in two language contexts.
► Bilinguals’ speech perception showed to differ as a function the language context.
► Bilinguals seem to allocate phonetic relevant information as a function of the language in use.