Is There a Bilingual Advantage in Implicit and Explicit Phonetic Imitation?

Abstract

Purpose: There are a number of reasons to predict that early bilinguals might have better imitation abilities than monolinguals; however, evidence for a bilingual advantage in phonetic imitation is mixed. In the current study, we attempt to reconcile these disparate findings by testing Spanish-English bilinguals' and English monolinguals' imitation of word-initial voice onset time (VOT) across two types of imitation tasks (implicit: word repetition and explicit: word imitation).

Method: In both tasks, participants heard English /p/-initial words manipulated to have canonical, shortened, or lengthened VOT. They were asked to repeat each word they heard, either with or without explicit instructions to imitate.

Results: Overall, the explicit task elicited more imitation than the implicit task. In the explicit task, both groups converged to both lengthened and shortened VOTs, whereas in the implicit task, both groups converged to lengthened VOTs but not to shortened VOTs. Importantly, we did not observe differences in degree of imitation between monolinguals and bilinguals.

Conclusions: This study found no evidence of a bilingual advantage in either implicit or explicit imitation. However, the two tasks elicited different patterns of results, with more imitation in the explicit task than in the implicit task, in terms of the degree of imitation (for lengthened VOT) and the presence/absence of imitation (for shortened VOT). In summary, the implicit versus explicit nature of the task cannot account for the mixed evidence for a bilingual advantage in imitation found in previous studies; more work is necessary to uncover which factors might underlie these discrepancies.