On the role of frequency-based cues in the segmentation strategies of adult OV-VO bilinguals

Abstract

The present investigation seeks to determine whether and under what circumstances can adult bilinguals deploy segmentation strategies characteristic of their two languages, or of their dominant language. To that end, we inquired whether the context language employed during the segmentation experiment (i.e., the language in which participants receive the instructions of the experiment) modulates the bilinguals' segmentation preferences given an ambiguous artificial language. Four groups of bilingual speakers of Basque (Object Verb, i.e., OV) and Spanish (Verb Object, i.e., VO) were sorted by their L1 and the context language (Basque or Spanish) in which the experiment was explained to the participants. We examined the bilinguals' segmentation preferences of an artificial language consistent of a strict alternation of frequent and infrequent syllables that allows two possible segmentations: a frequent-initial segmentation (i.e., in which frequent elements occur at initial position) and a frequent-final segmentation (i.e., in which frequent elements occur at final position). Results revealed that the context language modulated the segmentation preferences of L1Basque–L2Spanish bilinguals, but not the preferences of L1Spanish–L2Basque bilinguals. Adult bilinguals are thus able to deploy the frequency-based segmentation strategies of their two languages, though acquisition of the L2's strategy appears to be constrained.

Keywords:

• frequency
• bilingualism
• speech segmentation
• context language
• artificial languages
• OV-VO languages

Acknowledgments

We thank Judit Gervain for her invaluable input during this investigation. We also thank Adam Zawiszewski and Idoia Ros for their help in conducting this experiment and Julian Villegas for his help with statistical analysis.

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union [EC FP7/SSH-2013-1 AThEME (613465)], the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science [Consolider Ingenio CSD2007-00012], the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [FFI2012-31360, FFI2012-38064-C02-01, and PSI 2012-34071], the Basque Government [BFI07.253, IT665-13, and IT769-13], and the University of the Basque Country [UFI11/14]. N.S.G. received the prize ‘ICREA Acadèmia’ for excellence in research, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya.

Notes

1. The authors wish to thank one of the reviewers for pointing out this possibility.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This work was supported by the European Union [EC FP7/SSH-2013-1 AThEME (613465)], the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science [Consolider Ingenio CSD2007-00012], the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [FFI2012-31360, FFI2012-38064-C02-01, and PSI 2012-34071], the Basque Government [BFI07.253, IT665-13, and IT769-13], and the University of the Basque Country [UFI11/14]. N.S.G. received the prize ‘ICREA Acadèmia’ for excellence in research, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya.