View our presentation on [YouTube][1] Direct link: https://youtu.be/X07p9J9uwlE Presentation Abstract Exploring Phonetic Learning in Monolinguals and Bilinguals: Is There a Link Between Auditory Sensory Memory and Skill? Mariana Vasilita1, Oona Maria Toussaint2, Uliana Bernatska2, Julia Wallace1 Laura Spinu1 1City University of New York - Kingsborough Community College 2City University of New York - Brooklyn College Abstract: Bilingualism has been linked with improved function regarding certain aspects of linguistic processing, e.g. manipulating language in terms of discrete units (Bialystok et al. 2005), novel word acquisition (Kaushanskaya & Marian 2009), and learning unfamiliar sound patterns in novel accents (Spinu et al. 2018). A study in which subjects learned vocabularies that differentiated words using foreign phonetic contrasts (Antoniou et al. 2015) reports that bilinguals possess an advantage over monolinguals in phonetic learning. Other experimental work with non-native contrasts (Tremblay & Sabourin 2012) suggest that multilinguals and bilinguals have enhanced speech perception abilities compared to monolinguals. Two non-mutually-exclusive approaches attempt to explain these results in the literature. One is related to executive function, relying on attentional mechanisms and speculating that more effective learning is achieved through active selection of relevant information and suppression of potentially interfering information (Anderson et al. 2018). The other approach emphasizes the role of sensory mechanisms (Calabrese 2012, Spinu et al. 2018), specifically auditory sensory memory (ASM). Bilinguals have already been shown to perform better than monolinguals in tasks involving auditory processing (Krizman et al. 2012) and episodic memory recall (Ljunberg et al. 2013), but the questions whether (1) bilinguals' ASM skills are also enhanced, and (2) phonetic skill and ASM are correlated, remain open, however. Our study is the first to investigate phonetic learning skills and ASM in the same subjects (n=61) from two groups: early (simultaneous) bilinguals and monolinguals. The subjects were trained and tested on an artificial accent of English and their ASM was measured in a digit span task with suffix effect. It was found that the ASM of bilinguals significantly outlasts that of monolinguals. After completing the phonetic analysis of the recordings, it will also be possible to establish the degree of correlation between ASM and phonetic skill. References Anderson-Hsieh, J., Johnson, R., & Koehler, K. 1992. The relationship between native speaker judgments of nonnative pronunciation and deviance in segmentals, prosody, and syllable structure. Language Learning, 42, 529–555. Antoniou, M., Liang, E., Ettlinger, M., & Wong, P. C. M. 2015. The bilingual advantage in phonetic learning. Bilingualism: Lang & Cog, 18(4), 683–695. Calabrese, A. 2012. Auditory representations and phonological illusions: A linguist’s perspective on the neuropsychological bases of speech perception. Journal of Neurolinguistics 25: 355–381. Kaushanskaya, M., & Marian, V. 2009. The bilingual advantage in novel word learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 16(4). 705–710. Krizman, J., Marian, V., Shook, A., Skoe, E., & Kraus, N. 2012. Subcortical encoding of sound is enhanced in bilinguals and relates to executive function advantages. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109. 7877–7881. Ljungberg, J. K., Hansson, P., Andrés, P., Josefsson, M., & Nilsson, L. G. 2013. A longitudinal study of memory advantages in bilinguals. PLoS ONE, 8, e73029. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0073029 Spinu, L., Hwang, J., & Lohmann, R. 2016. Is there a bilingual advantage in phonetic and phonological acquisition? The initial learning of word-final coronal stop realization in a novel accent of English. International Journal of Bilingualism, available online DOI: 10.1177/1367006916681080. Tremblay, M.-C., & Sabourin, L. 2012. Comparing behavioral discrimination and learning abilities in monolinguals, bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132, 3465–3474. [1]: https://youtu.be/X07p9J9uwlE