What is it about?
Bilinguals differ widely in how they acquire languages; as such, it is always of interest to which language variable(s) is (are) the most critical in understanding their performance. This study included a group of bilinguals with various first languages and English learning backgrounds and developed models using these language background variables to predict bilinguals' recognition of English sentences degraded by noise and echo (reverberation). One of the key findings is that variables related to reading is highly relevant to how one uses context to recognize degraded English sentences.
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Why is it important?
This study compares a host of variables in English learning, English competency, and English proficiency variables in how they may help us understand bilinguals' recognition of English sentences corrupted by noise and echo. Evidence from this study shows the importance of reading variables in the quantification of one's skills in sentence recognition. This finding is unique since performance was assessed on a listening task.
Perspectives
Trying to tease out the most important language background variable is not an easy task. The stepwise regression employed in our study is a conventional technique, but lays a foundation for future investigations. The high correlation between reading variables and sentence recognition is surprising (because the latter is a listening task) yet understandable (because sentence recognition relies on context, which is a sophisticated language skill that gets honed through formal education). Reading is a literacy index. While one does not need to develop literacy to be a speaker of the language, acquisition of literacy doubtlessly suggests that one's language skills are advanced. A note for critics: although I did not include the VIFs in the manuscript, they were all lower than 3, suggesting that data were not at high risk of multicollinearity.
Lu Shi
Long Island University - Brooklyn Campus
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Contribution of Linguistic Variables to Bilingual Listeners' Perception of Degraded English Sentences, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, February 2012, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/1092-4388(2011/10-0240).
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