Phonological Perception Awareness: A Study with Bilinguals

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the perception of Arabic-English bilinguals towards the phonological characteristics of English. It also explores whether they establish separate phonological categories for their second language, independent of their first language. Regarding the sample, the study divided the twelve participants into two groups: a control group of native American-English speakers (NS) and an experimental group of Saudi Arabian learners of English as a Second Language (NN), who exhibited varying proficiency levels.  Four cognitive tasks were conducted to assess the participants' ability, on the one hand, to distinguish between correctly and incorrectly produced initial letter combinations of English words, and on the other hand, to identify speech with a foreign accent. By applying descriptive statistics and chi-square tests, the researcher analyzed data from bilingual assessment responses. The results showed that the bilinguals consistently identified unbroken letter combinations which formed a distinct phonological category for English. Older bilingual subjects demonstrated significantly better accuracy in distinguishing between native and semi-native speech due to increased exposure and the development of their perceptual processing skills. Phonetic analyses of the stimuli revealed differences in syllabic and suprasyllabic features, such as vowel duration, syllable quality, and overall word length. These differences likely helped identify dialects. These results support the theory that children who become bilingual early on are able to develop separate sound rules for each language. They also highlight the importance of sound cues when listening to a second language. The study concludes with recommendation for replications to include increasing the number of stimuli and participants to improve generalizability.