The Bilingual Disadvantage in Speech Understanding in Noise Is Likely a Frequency Effect Related to Reduced Language Exposure.

ABSTRACT: The present study sought to explain why bilingual speakers are disadvantaged relative to monolingual speakers when it comes to speech understanding in noise. Exemplar models of the mental lexicon hold that each encounter with a word leaves a memory trace in long-term memory. Words that we encounter frequently will be associated with richer phonetic representations in memory and therefore recognized faster and more accurately than less frequently encountered words. Because bilinguals are exposed to each of their languages less often than monolinguals by virtue of speaking two languages, they encounter all words less frequently and may therefore have poorer phonetic representations of all words compared to monolinguals. In the present study, vocabulary size was taken as an estimate for langu

SUBMITTER: Schmidtke J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4865492 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature