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Moving away from deficiency models: Gradiency in bilingual speech categorization
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Moving away from deficiency models: Gradiency in bilingual speech categorization

Ethan Kutlu, Samantha Chiu and Bob McMurray
Frontiers in psychology, Vol.13, p.1033825
11/24/2022
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1033825
PMCID: PMC9730410
PMID: 36507048
url
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1033825View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

For much of its history, categorical perception was treated as a foundational theory of speech perception, which suggested that quasi-discrete categorization was a goal of speech perception. This had a profound impact on bilingualism research which adopted similar tasks to use as measures of nativeness or native-like processing, implicitly assuming that any deviation from discreteness was a deficit. This is particularly problematic for listeners like heritage speakers whose language proficiency, both in their heritage language and their majority language, is questioned. However, we now know that in the monolingual listener, speech perception is gradient and listeners use this gradiency to adjust subphonetic details, recover from ambiguity, and aid learning and adaptation. This calls for new theoretical and methodological approaches to bilingualism. We present the Visual Analogue Scaling task which avoids the discrete and binary assumptions of categorical perception and can capture gradiency more precisely than other measures. Our goal is to provide bilingualism researchers new conceptual and empirical tools that can help examine speech categorization in different bilingual communities without the necessity of forcing their speech categorization into discrete units and without assuming a deficit model.
 Psychology bilingualism categorical perception gradiency heritage bilingualism sound acquisition speech perception

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