Speech Perception

In this chapter, studies examining speech perception by bilingual listeners are reviewed, including studies that have examined bilinguals’ perception of L1 and/or L2 speech segments, as well as those that have tested perception of unfamiliar, non-native speech segments. The factors that have been shown to affect bilinguals’ perception are discussed, most notably age of acquisition and L1:L2 usage both at long (e.g., proficiency and language dominance) and short timescales (e.g., language mode). An overview of the models of cross-language speech perception that have commonly been used to explain the perceptual patterns of bilinguals are provided, even though the models themselves were not developed for this purpose. The literature on bilinguals’ perception of suprasegmentals are also reviewed. Finally, an outline is given of some challenges facing the field of bilingual speech perception to be addressed by future research.