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Processing of Diphthongs by Turkish English Bilinguals: An ERP Study

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

ecem kopuz¹ (), daniel schwartz², ebony egoldman¹, valerie shafer¹; ¹CUNY Graduate Center, Department of Speech Language and Hearing Sciences, ²CUNY Graduate Center, Department of Linguistics

This study examines how native phonological experience influences the brain’s response to speech sounds in Turkish-English (TE) late bilinguals and American-English (AE) monolinguals. We asked whether neural responses reflecting encoding of auditory information would be sensitive to language-specific experience. Using the event-related potentials (ERP) Acoustic Change Complex (ACC), we measured neural responses to six stimuli, /u/, /ua/, /iu/, /ia/, /ea/, /eu/ where the vowel quality changes for all of these, except /u/ at 200 ms after onset. Participants were expected to show sensitivity to a change in vowel quality, but phonological differences between the two languages might lead to difference in the ACC, particularly for vowels changing the rounding and backness features (e.g., /i/ to /u/). In Turkish vowel harmony rules result in a second vowel taking on the features of the first vowel for many words. Twenty participants (10 AE, 10 TE) were tested using a 17-channel system. Results showed a significant ACC effect 200 ms after the vowel change at frontal-central sites, consisting of a P2 and N2 to the vowel change. No group differences were observed. This study suggests that general auditory mechanisms are reflected by the ACC. This finding, however, will need replication with a larger sample and other languages before concluding that language specific experience does not modulate the response. The future goal is to develop this measure as an index of auditory-phonetic deficits in bilingual populations.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Other