Noisy and Echoy Sentences Are Hard Even for Bilinguals Who Learned English Before 2 Years of Age

What is it about?

Everyday listening environments are full of background noise and echoes, which degrade human speech. For effective communication to take place, listeners have to be knowledgeable with the language to take advantage of context to figure out degraded speech. This task is understandably more difficult for late learners of English than native English speakers. Our study went further and included a group of native bilingual listeners who started learning English by the age of 2 and were highly proficient in English. Some of these listeners, however, did significantly more poorly than their native monolingual peers when sentences were moderately degraded by babble noise and reverberation (echo). Our finding contradicts most of previous studies by demonstrating that very early bilinguals may still be at an advantage in an acoustically challenging environment.

Why is it important?

We often assume that any native speakers of the language should do fine on a listening task involving that language. We seldom pause to think that native speakers of English can be bilingual and may have to juggle multiple languages while growing up. Our study suggests that it may be a stretch to make the assumption that their performance in one of the languages is naturally comparable to native speakers who speak that language only.