How bilinguals listen in noise: Linguistic and non-linguistic factors

Jennifer Krizman; Ann R. Bradlow; Silvia Siu Yin Lam; Nina Kraus

doi:10.1017/S1366728916000444

How bilinguals listen in noise: Linguistic and non-linguistic factors

Jennifer Krizman, Ann R. Bradlow, Silvia Siu Yin Lam, Nina Kraus^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

60 Scopus citations

Abstract

Bilinguals are known to perform worse than monolinguals on speech-in-noise tests. However, the mechanisms underlying this difference are unclear. By varying the amount of linguistic information available in the target stimulus across five auditory-perception-in-noise tasks, we tested if differences in language-independent (sensory/cognitive) or language-dependent (extracting linguistic meaning) processing could account for this disadvantage. We hypothesized that language-dependent processing differences underlie the bilingual disadvantage and predicted that it would manifest on perception-in-noise tasks that use linguistic stimuli. We found that performance differences between bilinguals and monolinguals varied with the linguistic processing demands of each task: early, high-proficiency, Spanish-English bilingual adolescents performed worse than English monolingual adolescents when perceiving sentences, similarly when perceiving words, and better when perceiving tones in noise. This pattern suggests that bottlenecks in language-dependent processing underlie the bilingual disadvantage while language-independent perception-in-noise processes are enhanced.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	834-843
Number of pages	10
Journal	Bilingualism
Volume	20
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728916000444
State	Published - Aug 1 2017

Funding

The authors thank the members of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory for their help in data collection and distillation. The authors also thank Jessica Slater, Trent Nicol, and Travis White-Schwoch for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and Christine Junhui Liu for her help in copyediting the manuscript. This research is funded by NSF SMA1015614, NIH DC009399, NIH 5F31DC014221, Cognitive Science Program, Northwestern University, and the Knowles Hearing Center, Northwestern University.

Keywords

adolescence
cognitive processing
listening in noise
sensory processing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Education
Language and Linguistics
Linguistics and Language

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10.1017/S1366728916000444

Cite this

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title = "How bilinguals listen in noise: Linguistic and non-linguistic factors",

abstract = "Bilinguals are known to perform worse than monolinguals on speech-in-noise tests. However, the mechanisms underlying this difference are unclear. By varying the amount of linguistic information available in the target stimulus across five auditory-perception-in-noise tasks, we tested if differences in language-independent (sensory/cognitive) or language-dependent (extracting linguistic meaning) processing could account for this disadvantage. We hypothesized that language-dependent processing differences underlie the bilingual disadvantage and predicted that it would manifest on perception-in-noise tasks that use linguistic stimuli. We found that performance differences between bilinguals and monolinguals varied with the linguistic processing demands of each task: early, high-proficiency, Spanish-English bilingual adolescents performed worse than English monolingual adolescents when perceiving sentences, similarly when perceiving words, and better when perceiving tones in noise. This pattern suggests that bottlenecks in language-dependent processing underlie the bilingual disadvantage while language-independent perception-in-noise processes are enhanced.",

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N2 - Bilinguals are known to perform worse than monolinguals on speech-in-noise tests. However, the mechanisms underlying this difference are unclear. By varying the amount of linguistic information available in the target stimulus across five auditory-perception-in-noise tasks, we tested if differences in language-independent (sensory/cognitive) or language-dependent (extracting linguistic meaning) processing could account for this disadvantage. We hypothesized that language-dependent processing differences underlie the bilingual disadvantage and predicted that it would manifest on perception-in-noise tasks that use linguistic stimuli. We found that performance differences between bilinguals and monolinguals varied with the linguistic processing demands of each task: early, high-proficiency, Spanish-English bilingual adolescents performed worse than English monolingual adolescents when perceiving sentences, similarly when perceiving words, and better when perceiving tones in noise. This pattern suggests that bottlenecks in language-dependent processing underlie the bilingual disadvantage while language-independent perception-in-noise processes are enhanced.

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How bilinguals listen in noise: Linguistic and non-linguistic factors

Abstract

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