What is it about?
People have a natural inclination to imitate the speech of others. But what makes some people better imitators? Here we investigate whether bilingualism (or speaking more than one language) might enhance people’s ability to spontaneously (i.e., without instructions to imitate) and intentionally (i.e., with explicit instructions to try to sound like the speaker) imitate others. In naturalistic speech, there are many features that differ, making it difficult to quantify overall imitation, so in this study, we created two versions of the same speech that differed in only a single feature, the pronunciation of the sound ‘p,’ in order to be able to precisely quantify the degree of imitation. Both English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals imitated the differences, most clearly when explicitly asked to try to sound like the speaker, but also, to a lesser extent, when they were simply asked to repeat the words, with no instructions to imitate.
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Why is it important?
Imitation is a fundamental component of language learning and use, and while everyone has been a successful imitator at some point, in order to learn a language, there is a large degree of variability in the extent to which adult speakers imitate. However, we do not have a solid understanding of the factors underlying this variability. This study investigated one plausible factor, bilingualism, thought to influence imitation, in the context of two different types of imitation. Given the number of people who are multilingual, it is important to understand how knowledge of more than one language influences speech perception and production.
Perspectives
Some studies have found evidence for a bilingual advantage in imitation where as others have not. Here we wanted to test this question in a controlled, rigorous way, by isolating a single feature (pronunciation of the sound ‘p’). In our study, we found no evidence that bilinguals imitated this feature more than monolinguals, which is interesting because they readily produce differences in this feature when they speak English and Spanish!
Melissa Paquette-Smith
University of California Los Angeles
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Is There a Bilingual Advantage in Implicit and Explicit Phonetic Imitation?, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, August 2025, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2025_jslhr-25-00035.
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