Two types of bilinguals – Two types of production contexts

Language context affects different kinds of bilinguals differently at the preattentive level in speech perception. Bilinguals from birth (balanced bilinguals) perceive their languages in both language contexts similarly, which indicates that they have one unified phonological system. In contrast, bilinguals who have learned their second language in a classroom (dominant bilinguals) perceive speech according to separate, language specific systems and have separate phonological systems for the two languages. The present study focuses on speech production in similar kinds of bilinguals. We used three different language contexts, monolingual Finnish and Swedish and a bilingual context, in speech production tasks. Language context effects are seen in speech production of both bilingual groups. The difference in mother tongue identity is also shown as the dominant bilinguals differ from the balanced bilinguals in the production of Swedish vowels between monolingual and bilingual language contexts.