Does consistency in perceptual assimilation reflect language dominance in early bilinguals?

Abstract

Using the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (Marian et al., 2007), we collected measures of language dominance for 23 early bilingual Azerbaijani-Persian (AZ-PE) adolescents and 21 monolingual PE peers. In a perceptual assimilation (PA) task, these participants had identified each of the 11 pure vowels of American English (AE) as one of the six monophthongs of PE, and the bilinguals also as one of the nine monophthongs of AZ. Vowel tokens were presented twice in different random orders, yielding consistent (same choice twice) and inconsistent (different choices) response pairs. We test the hypothesis that PA consistency, defined as the percentage of consistent pairs, should reflect language dominance. Results show that an optimal combination of LEAP-Q parameters explains 35% of the variance in PA consistency. The correlation is significant but not strong enough to advocate PA consistency as a useful and reliable correlate of language dominance.