Moving away from deficiency models: Gradiency in bilingual speech categorization

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Ethan Kutlu¹  Samantha Chiu¹  Bob McMurray¹ 

[1] Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa;Department of Linguistics, University of Iowa

关键词: Speech Perception;    gradiency;    categorical perception;    bilingualism;    sound acquisition;    heritage bilingualism;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1033825

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

For much of its history, categorical perception was treated as a foundational theory of speech perception, which suggested that quasi-discrete categorization was a goal of speech perception This had a profound impact on bilingualism research which adopted similar tasks to use as measures of nativeness or native-like processing, implicitly assuming that any deviation from discreteness was a deficit. This is particularly problematic for listeners like heritage speakers whose language proficiency, both in their heritage language and their majority language, is questioned. However, we now know that in monolingual listener, speech perception is gradient and listeners use this gradiency to adjust subphonetic details, recover from ambiguity, and aide learning and adaptation. This calls for new theoretical and methodological approaches to bilingualism. We present the Visual Analogue Scaling (VAS) task which avoids the discrete and binary assumptions of categorical perception and can capture gradiency more precisely than other measures. Our goal is to provide bilingualism researchers new conceptual and empirical tools that can help examine speech categorization in different bilingual communities without the necessity of forcing their speech categorization into discrete units and without assuming a deficit model.

【 授权许可】

CC BY