Do bilinguals apply Spanish sound rules while hearing English?
After hearing English words starting with 'st' or 'sp', Spanish-English bilinguals, but not English monolinguals, were faster to judge letter strings starting with the extra 'e' that Spanish requires, suggesting their first-language sound rule was switched on during English listening.
Source
Phonotactic Constraints Are Activated across Languages in Bilinguals
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Cross-modal phonological priming lexical decision: spoken English primes (cognate, non-cognate or control) followed after a 350 ms gap by a written target (Spanish-like /es/ non-word, /e/-only non-word, control non-word or real word); within-subject prime x target factors, between-subject language group
- N
- N=45 · 22 Spanish-English bilinguals and 23 English monolinguals, matched on age, non-verbal reasoning and working memory
- Population
- Young adults at and around Northwestern University; bilinguals were native Spanish speakers who learned English at age 5 or later and still used Spanish daily
- Outcome
- Lexical decision reaction time and accuracy to written targets as a function of prime type, target type and language group
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What they did
Spanish forbids words from starting with s plus a consonant, so speakers add an 'e' (English 'stable' is Spanish 'estable'). The researchers played English words that were either cognates (stable), non-cognates (strong) or controls (workers), then showed a letter string and asked participants to decide quickly whether it was an English word. Targets were non-words starting with 'es' plus consonant (sharing the Spanish rule and form), non-words starting with just 'e' (sharing only the rule), ordinary control non-words, or real English words. Bilinguals and monolinguals were compared on reaction time.
What they found
Monolinguals were faster overall than bilinguals, who were working in their second language. Only bilinguals showed a reliable advantage for Spanish-rule targets: after cognate primes they were faster on 'es' non-words than control non-words (848.45 vs 922.29 ms on average), and after non-cognate primes they were faster on both 'es' and 'e'-only non-words than controls. The 'e'-only effect after cognates was only marginal, so, against the authors' prediction, non-cognates produced cleaner evidence of rule activation than cognates. Monolinguals showed only a small priming effect in one condition that could be explained by shared English letters.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The samples are small, 22 bilinguals and 23 monolinguals, and several key effects were marginal. All critical targets were non-words, so the study does not show that the Spanish rule speeds recognition of real English or Spanish words; the authors call for a replication with real-word targets. It cannot distinguish whether bilinguals activated the rule itself or perceptually 'repaired' what they heard into an e-initial form. Only late bilinguals and one phonotactic rule were tested, so it is unclear whether earlier bilinguals or other rules show the same pattern.
Key terms
- Phonotactic constraint
- A rule about which sound sequences are allowed in a language, such as Spanish not allowing a word to begin with s followed by a consonant.
- Epenthesis
- Inserting an extra sound to make a sequence legal, like Spanish speakers adding 'e' before an initial s-cluster.
- Cognate
- A word that is similar in form and meaning across two languages, such as English 'stable' and Spanish 'estable'.
- Lexical decision task
- A task in which people decide as quickly as possible whether a letter string is a real word; faster responses indicate easier access.
- Parallel language activation
- The finding that bilinguals' two languages are both partly active even when only one language is being used.
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Quiz yourself
What does the Spanish epenthesis rule do to an English word like 'strict'?
Common questions
Why use non-words that start with 'es' or 'e' instead of real Spanish words?
The aim was to activate the Spanish sound pattern without triggering any specific Spanish word, so any speed-up could be attributed to the rule and partial sound overlap rather than to meaning or a particular Spanish lexical item.
Why include a monolingual English group?
Monolinguals do not know the Spanish rule, so they show how much priming comes just from shared English letters and sounds. Effects seen only in bilinguals point to the influence of Spanish.
Why might cognates have produced weaker effects than non-cognates?
The authors suggest cognates create strong competition between languages, so bilinguals may actively suppress Spanish-specific patterns to stay in English, dampening the rule's influence.
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