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How bilinguals listen in noise: linguistic and non-linguistic factors*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 May 2016

JENNIFER KRIZMAN ,
ANN R. BRADLOW ,
SILVIA SIU-YIN LAM  and
NINA KRAUS
JENNIFER KRIZMAN
Affiliation:
Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University
ANN R. BRADLOW
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University
SILVIA SIU-YIN LAM
Affiliation:
Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University
NINA KRAUS*
Affiliation:
Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory (www.brainvolts.northwestern.edu) Department of Communication Sciences, Northwestern University Institute for Neuroscience, Northwestern University Department of Neurobiology and Physiology, Northwestern University Department of Otolaryngology, Northwestern University
*
Address for Correspondence: Nina Kraus, Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston IL, 60208, USAnkraus@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

Bilinguals are known to perform worse than monolinguals on speech-in-noise tests. However, the mechanisms underlying this difference are unclear. By varying the amount of linguistic information available in the target stimulus across five auditory-perception-in-noise tasks, we tested if differences in language-independent (sensory/cognitive) or language-dependent (extracting linguistic meaning) processing could account for this disadvantage. We hypothesized that language-dependent processing differences underlie the bilingual disadvantage and predicted that it would manifest on perception-in-noise tasks that use linguistic stimuli. We found that performance differences between bilinguals and monolinguals varied with the linguistic processing demands of each task: early, high-proficiency, Spanish–English bilingual adolescents performed worse than English monolingual adolescents when perceiving sentences, similarly when perceiving words, and better when perceiving tones in noise. This pattern suggests that bottlenecks in language-dependent processing underlie the bilingual disadvantage while language-independent perception-in-noise processes are enhanced.

Keywords

listening in noiseadolescencesensory processingcognitive processing
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , August 2017 , pp. 834 - 843
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

The authors thank the members of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory for their help in data collection and distillation. The authors also thank Jessica Slater, Trent Nicol, and Travis White-Schwoch for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and Christine Junhui Liu for her help in copyediting the manuscript. This research is funded by NSF SMA1015614, NIH DC009399, NIH 5F31DC014221, Cognitive Science Program, Northwestern University, and the Knowles Hearing Center, Northwestern University.

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