Bilinguals' Speech Perception

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One's native language influences how speech soundsare perceived. For example, the English 'd' isperceived as 't' by native Spanish speakers. Thisfact suggests that bilinguals' speakers may developdouble phonemic boundaries for speech sounds thathave equal acoustic information but different meaningin each of the languages they speak. The goal of thepresent book was to test the double phonemic boundaryin bilingual speakers of Spanish and English.Bilinguals participated in two language contexts onewas in English and one was in. In each languagecontext two measures were done: One measure involvedpressing a response button when a repetitivebackground 'd' sound changed to 't'. The secondmeasure involved assessing the brain activityassociated to the sound change. The results showedthat the underlying neural mechanisms associatedbetween stimulus and response did change betweenlanguage contexts even though the behavioralresponses did not change dramatically. This booksheds some light in how language contexts affectphonetic judgments in bilinguals and monolinguals, and how language contexts affects the underlyingneural mechanism associated with speech discrimination.