CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 128Phonetics and Phonology ResearchNeurobiology of Language and BilingualismLanguage Development and Disorders

Consonant and vowel perception and production: early English-French bilinguals and English monolinguals.

Open access
Mack, Molly·1989·Perception & Psychophysics
DOI 10.3758/bf03204982
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

This study is a comparative analysis of the English phonetic systems of 10 fluent adult English-French bilinguals who acquired their two languages prior to age 8 and who were English-dominant, and of 10 adult English monolinguals. The objective of the study was to determine whether or not early English-dominant bilinguals perceive and produce speech as English monolinguals do. Discrimination and identification tests of synthetic (d-t) and (i-I) continua and speech production tests revealed that the bilinguals' discrimination and production of (d) and (t) and their production of (I) did not differ significantly from the monolinguals'. However, the bilinguals' identification of (d-t) and (i-I) and one aspect of their production of (i) did differ significantly from that of the monolinguals. The present results indicate that early bilingualism can yield monolingual-like performance in at least one of the bilinguals' languages, but only with respect to certain aspects of the phonetic system. These findings are viewed in light of sound-class distinctions, the perception-production dichotomy, and bilingual phonetic transfer and restructuring.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.3758/bf03204982

Cites

87 of 87 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • For the percentage of /i/ vowels whose F2 fell at least 50 Hz between the vowel midpoint and offset, bilinguals differ significantly from monolinguals.

    “In a separate analysis, however, for the percentage of /i/ vowels whose F2 fell at least 50 Hz between the vowel midpoint and offset, bilinguals differ significantly from monolinguals.”

    From Plasticity, Variability and Age in Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism (2018) · cites this paper as Mack (1989)

  • For /ta/-/da/ discrimination and /i/-/I/ production, early English-French and French-English bilingual adults who were English dominant resemble English monolingual adult controls.

    “For /ta/-/da/ discrimination and /i/-/I/ production, the bilingual group resembles English monolingual adult controls.”

    From Plasticity, Variability and Age in Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism (2018) · cites this paper as Mack (1989)

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 8

  1. [3]3. ASLIN, R. N., & PISONI, D. B. (1980). Some developmental processes in speech perception. In G. H. Yeni-Komshian, J. F. Kavanagh, & C. A. Ferguson (Eds.), Child phonology: Vol. 2. Perception (pp. 67- 96). New York: Academic Press.
  2. [23]23. FLEGE, J. E., 8< HILLENBRAND, J. (1984). Limits on pronunciation ac- curacy in adult foreign language speech production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 76,708-721.
  3. [29]29. HEFFNER, R-M. S. (1950). Generalphonetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
  4. [31]31. KEATING, P. A. (1980). A phonetic studyofa voicing contrast in Polish. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Brown University, Providence, RI.
  5. [37]37. LIEBERMAN, P., & BLUMSTEIN, S. E. (1988). Speech physiology, speech perception, andacoustic phonetics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
  6. [44]44. MACK, M. (in press). Phonetic transfer in a French-English bilingual child. Proceedings of the Contact & Conflict Conference (Vol. 3), Research Centre on Multilingualism, International Symposium, Brussels.
  7. [50]50. OBLER, L. (1982). The parsimonious bilingual. In L. K. Obler & L. Menn (Eds.), Exceptional language and linguistics (pp. 339-346). New York: Academic Press.
  8. [70]70. SMITH, N. V. (1973). Theacquisition ofphonology: A case study. Cam- bridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Mack, M.
Affiliations
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
Corresponding author
Mack, Molly
ORCID
Mack, Molly
Venue
Perception & Psychophysics
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
1989-03
Volume
46
Issue
2
Pages
187-200
ISSN
  • 0031-5117 (ISSN-L)
  • 1532-5962
DOI
10.3758/bf03204982
OpenAlex
W1987737764
Cited by
128
References
86
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 4 · 2013: 6 · 2012: 6
FWCI
0.48
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
Locations
  • Perception & Psychophysics (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Funders
American Association of University Women
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
Keywords
early bilingualism, French-English bilinguals, consonant perception, vowel perception, speech production, phonetic transfer
MeSH terms
Adult, Female, Humans, Language, Male, Phonetics, Psychoacoustics, Psycholinguistics, Sound Spectrography, Speech Perception, Verbal Behavior

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review