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Description: This archive contains materials and data for a preregistered study. How do bilinguals represent category structure for phonemes in early acquired languages? /b/ and /p/ voice onset times (VOTs) are earlier and closer together in English than in Mandarin. Hence the way people categorize these sounds can show ‘tuning’ to language-specific acoustic structure (i.e., earlier boundary and steeper slope for English). As preregistered, we mapped identification functions of early English-Mandarin bilingual adults (N=66) on a /b/ - /p/ VOT continuum in each language. Each person’s bilingual-balance was estimated using principal component analysis and entered into GLMMs of categorical boundary and slope. As predicted, VOTs were earlier for English than Mandarin. In addition, early bilingual-balance predicted the slope of the transition between categories: Those who heard more English from an earlier age showed steeper category boundaries than those who heard more Mandarin. This finding suggests early bilinguals may transfer their model for how speech categories differ (steeper/shallower) from their stronger early-childhood languages to other languages, while updating the position of language-specific category boundary (earlier/later). The research report arising from this work is Open Access: Pan L, Ke H & Styles SJ (2022) ‘Early linguistic experience shapes bilingual adults’ hearing for phonemes in both languages’, Scientific Reports. 12 (4703). Open Access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-08557-7