[PS-3.8] Phonotactic patterns influence bilingual advantage in statistical segmentation

Aguasvivas, J. 1 , Duñabeitia, J. A. 2, 1 & Carreiras, M. 1, 3

1 BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language; San Sebastian, Spain
2 Facultad de Lenguas y Educación, Universidad de Nebrija; Madrid, Spain
3 Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science; Bilbao, Spain

Learning different languages involves learning new word forms, and new mappings between forms and meanings. Some evidence suggests that high bilingual experience and cognitive control lead to an advantage in phonological processing during SL tasks. The present research addresses the role of phonotactic patterns by comparing the performance of bilinguals and monolinguals in three SL tasks. Matched groups of Spanish-Basque bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals listened to three artificial language streams in counterbalanced order. One contained simple phonotactic patterns (e.g., /motufi/), while the remaining two contained complex phonotactic patterns, either legal (e.g., /betafre/ or /flebiko/), or illegal (e.g., /gmadonu/ or /tenobso/). After the learning phase in each of the languages, participants completed a forced-choice test. Results indicate that, while participants can segment above chance level, there is an effect of input complexity, as well as differences between the groups in the complex-illegal condition, but not the complex-legal condition. These results suggest that, when the input of learning is in its simplest form, bilinguals and monolinguals seem to perform at the same level but, when confronted with conflicting phonotactic patterns, bilinguals can outperform monolinguals. This supports the idea that bilinguals show an advantage in SL performance with complex input.