Cross-linguistic phonetic recalibration in bilingual lexical processing

The study explores phonetic recalibration as a novel method for investigating sound-category linkages across languages, by examining cross-linguistic generalization of phoneme retuning among Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 110). Participants were trained to recalibrate the perceptual boundary between /p/ and /k/ in one of their languages, English or Spanish, via a lexical decision task which included words with acoustically manipulated /p/ or /k/. Recalibration was subsequently tested via an identification task in both of their languages, thus determining whether recalibration generalized to the untrained language. The results revealed asymmetric generalization patterns. While recalibration always occurred in the trained language, it transferred to the untrained language only in the direction of English to Spanish, but not Spanish to English, suggesting that L1 and L2 sound categories were asymmetrically linked. We discuss possible explanations for this asymmetry, including the language dominance profile of our participants. These findings expand significantly on previous cross-linguistic recalibration research through two methodological innovations. First, recalibration was tested across phonetically distinct categories: voiceless aspirated stops in English and voiceless unaspirated stops in Spanish. Second, cross-language training and testing stimuli were produced by different speakers, ruling out the possibility that generalization across languages could be attributed to speaker-specific learning.