PIRE fellows Angelica Brill and Emily Herman present poster at the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America.
Spanish speakers often produce English words with initial /s/-consonant clusters with an initial [e], e.g. school as [esku:l]. This has been linked to the perception of an illusory [e] preceding acoustic [sC] sequences, but there is evidence that exposure to English can weaken this illusion, raising the possibility that late Spanish-English bilinguals can learn to distinguish tokens like eschool from school, but they map both to the target word. Lexical decision and auditory discrimination experiments confirmed this hypothesis. Late Spanish-English bilinguals accepted both pronunciations readily (from either native- or Spanish-accented talkers), but they also discriminated them easily.
Citation: Carlson, M. T., Brill, A., Herman, E., & Olmstead, A. (2022, January). Can you un-hear that?: Phonotactics and the lexicon in Spanish-English bilinguals’ perception of English words. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC.