Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Languages vary in the acoustic properties of their phonemes. For example, the English b is acoustically similar to theSpanish p. It is unclear whether bilinguals have separate phonological representations for each language, or one set thatis used universally. If separate, we predict bilinguals will respond differently to a given acoustic stimulus depending onwhich language-specific representations they access. Bilingual subjects participated in an English or Spanish context,with a monolingual English group as control. Subjects viewed pairs of pictures with names differing only in their initialphoneme (e.g. bear & pear, or beso & peso) and heard auditory stimuli consisting of a phoneme (e.g. p). Subjectswere instructed to click the image whose name begins with the phoneme they heard, and mouse data was recorded. Ifmouse trajectory varies as a function of language context, this would provide evidence that bilinguals possess separatephonological representations for each language.