USF St. Petersburg campus Faculty Publications

Spanish-English speech perception in children and adults: Developmental trends.

SelectedWorks Author Profiles:

Alejandro Brice

Cynthia B. Leung

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2013

ISSN

0269-9206

Abstract

This study explored the developmental trends and phonetic category formation in bilingual children and adults. Participants included 30 fluent Spanish–English bilingual children, aged 8–11, and bilingual adults, aged 18– 40. All completed gating tasks that incorporated code-mixed Spanish–English stimuli. There were significant differences in performance according to phonotactic construction of the stimuli, with fastest word recognition on words with voiceless initial consonants. Analysis of developmental trends revealed significant differences in children’s performance by grade level and fastest recognition on English voiceless initial consonants than Spanish voiceless initial consonants. Differences in voice onset time between English and Spanish may have contributed to quicker recognition of English voiceless consonants than Spanish voiceless consonants. It is also possible that increased exposure to both spoken and written English may account for faster recognition of English voiceless words than Spanish voiceless words. In conclusion, multiple factors may influence perception of a second language.

Comments

Abstract only. At this time, full-text article is available only through licensed access provided by the publisher. Published in Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 27(3), 220-234. doi 10.3109/02699206.2012.757805. Members of the USF System may access the full-text of the article through the authenticated link provided.

Language

en_US

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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