Samuel, A. 1, 2, 3 & Dance, C. 4, 3
1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, & Language. Donostia, Spain
2 Ikerbasque. Bilbao, Spain
3 Stony Brook University. Stony Brook, USA
4 UC San Diego. La Jolla, USA
When part of a spoken word is removed and replaced by noise, listeners usually still hear the speech as intact. This illusion of intact speech has been called phonemic restoration, and it appears to reflect the top-down use if knowledge (e.g., lexical information) to fill in the missing phonemic material. Previous work on restoration has focused on monolingual English speakers, and has been used to argue for automatic top-down processing. The question examined in the current study is whether such automaticity is also characteristic of speech perception in a bilingual’s second language (L2). Spanish-English bilinguals living in the US were tested to determine the strength of restoration in both their native (Spanish) and second (English) language; monolingual controls were also tested. The bilingual participants reported the age at which they learned English, which allowed us to determine if age of L2 acquisition affects the strength of phonemic restoration, and by inference, automaticity of speech processing. Bilinguals who learned English after the age of 7 restored missing speech in English words significantly less than English monolinguals. Those who learned English at an earlier age showed a restoration rate that fell in between those of native English speakers, and the late learners. Overall, the results suggest that there is less automatic support for speech perception for non-native speakers than for native speakers, with age of L2 acquisition affecting the degree of automaticity that can be achieved.