Identifying bilingual talkers after a language switch. Language experience matters

Abstract

The current study investigates the role of language experience in generalizing indexical information across languages within bilingual speech. Participants (n = 48) learned to identify bilingual talkers speaking in one of their languages and were then tested on their ability to identify the same talker when speaking the same language and when speaking their other language. Both monolingual and bilingual participants showed above chance performance in identifying the talkers in both language contexts. However, bilingual participants outperformed monolinguals in generalizing knowledge about the speaker’s voice across their two familiar languages, which may be driven by their experience with language mixing.