Description:

Dissertation Defense

L. Ann Burchfield

Abstract

This dissertation examines speech perception and production strategies in Mandarin-English bilinguals. We ask what happens when a bilingual’s two languages differ in basic perception or production strategies. In particular, we ask whether multiple perception and production strategies are available to bilinguals and how language experience affects a bilingual’s choice of strategy.  Both of our experiments included English monolingual controls and three bilingual groups: Late Mandarin-English bilinguals (L1 Mandarin L2 English), Early Mandarin-English bilinguals (Mandarin heritage speakers), and Late English-Mandarin bilinguals (L1 English L2 Mandarin). In Experiment 1, we examine speech perception strategies in Mandarin-English bilinguals with a fragment detection task. We find that all groups of bilinguals showed evidence of a syllable-based segmentation strategy in Mandarin, and no evidence of a syllable-based segmentation strategy in English. In Experiment 2, we examine speech production strategies in an implicit priming task. Previous work has suggested that the syllable is a basic unit of speech planning in Mandarin, while the phoneme serves this role in English (O’Seaghdha et al., 2010). We find that the L1 Mandarin L2 English group and the Mandarin heritage speakers differed in production strategies across languages. In particular, the Mandarin Heritage speakers showed L1-like strategies in both Mandarin and English. In both experiments, bilinguals were able to change between L1 and L2 strategies depending on task language. Overall, these results suggest flexibility in bilingual perception and production strategies. We suggest that differences between English and Mandarin, such as differences in syllable structure and syllable-morpheme correspondence, promote different perception and production strategies and create an environment that allows this bilingual flexibility to surface.