Phoneme Discrimination of an Unrelated Language: Evidence for a Narrow Transfer But Not a Broad-Based Bilingual Advantage

Abstract

This study examines monolingual and multilingual individuals’ discrimination of stop consonants in a language to which they had never been exposed: Korean. If bilingualism leads to increased flexibility in phonological categorization, we may see a broad-based bilingual advantage for phoneme discrimination. Using a Korean phoneme discrimination task, we compared 56 adults in four groups: monolingual English, bilingual Spanish, bilingual Armenian, and trilingual. Findings indicate that Spanish-English bilingual individuals scored no better than English monolinguals, and lower than Armenian-English bilingual individuals. In this case, the advantage from early childhood non-English exposure or current bilingualism was found to be specific only to languages with similar phonemic categories. This supports a narrow first/second language to third language transfer view of phoneme discrimination skills.

Keywords: Phoneme discrimination, Korean, bilingual advantage, unrelated language, monolingual, trilingual, narrow transfer