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Phonemic restoration in monolingual and bilingual listeners in a sentence context

Phonemic restoration, the illusion in which listeners perceive a word as intact when a phoneme is replaced by non-speech noise, has been shown in both adults and children (Warren 1970; Newman 2004). Phonemic restoration appears to have a lexical basis (Samuel 1997); however, bilingual listeners may be limited in their ability to engage this top-down skill because their lexical knowledge is necessarily less robust in a given language than that of their monolingual peers. Bilingual phonemic restoration has rarely been shown, particularly in sentences, but exploring it allows us to better understand the top-down linguistic factors of the effect. In the present study, monolingual and bilingual English speakers listened to and transcribed 92 low-predictability sentences in four conditions: no noise, pink noise throughout, pink noise-filled gaps, and silent gaps. Here “bilingual” includes both crib bilinguals and English L2 speakers. Preliminary results suggest that monolingual listeners show the standard phonemic restoration effect such that transcription is more accurate for filled-gap than silent-gap sentences, but that bilingual listeners do not. For bilingual listeners only, English verbal fluency scores are positively correlated with transcription accuracy in all three degraded conditions (noise throughout, filled-gap, and silent gap), suggesting that language proficiency contributes to listeners' ability to comprehend speech in various types of noise.