We believe that bilinguals’ advantage in language learning may – partially - be connected with superior motor control, as their articulators have had daily practice with more than one set of sounds since early childhood. The main purpose of the current study is to determine whether articulatory differences exist between mono- and bilingual through the analysis of tongue-twister production. A subset of the sounds produced were manually aligned in Praat to validate the raters' auditory scoring of phonetic accuracy and determine whether speakers also differed in less perceptible aspects of speech like hypo-articulation and duration.
The results show that while there are no overall differences in accuracy between the two main groups (monolingual vs. multilingual), bilinguals who were first exposed to their second language later in life (between 5-15) exhibit a statistically significant advantage in the articulation of tongue-twisters. Our findings underscore the importance of directly measuring bilingual language proficiency and incorporating this information to experimental design.