Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies have demonstrated that bilinguals have discrete representations for speech sounds that are phonemic in both of their languages. In a lexical identification task for Singapore Mandarin words 椅 (/i2/ ‘chair') and 鱼 (/y2/ ‘fish'), we find steepness of the identification functions differs among bilinguals with different linguistic experience, with steeper slopes for early English-Mandarin bilinguals (for whom the /y/ vowel is phonemic) and shallower slopes for early English-Malay bilinguals (for whom /y/ is not phonemic, but is largely discriminable in the forced choice task). With nuanced language background information, this finding suggests that exposure to both /i/ and /y/ in early development shapes phonemic perception. Model comparisons demonstrate that continuous measures of early exposure are more powerful than simple categorical groupings of bilingual ‘type'. Continuous measures of bilingual exposure are therefore highlighted as useful tools in the investigation of phoneme perception.