Summary: Researchers report that bilingual children outperform monolingual peers at recognizing and processing voices, showing an advantage in identifying who is speaking.
Source: NYU
Bilingual children are more accurate and faster than monolingual children at perceiving who is speaking, including recognizing and learning voices, according to a study from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
The research, published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, identifies a social perceptual benefit of bilingualism that goes beyond established cognitive advantages. The study shows that bilingual children have improved perceptual skills for talker-voice information — the cues in speech that reveal who is speaking, independently of the words being said.
“Bilingual children have a perceptual advantage when processing information about a talker’s voice,” said Susannah Levi, assistant professor of communicative sciences and disorders at NYU Steinhardt and the study’s lead author. “This advantage appears in the social side of speech perception: it’s not about the linguistic content, but about perceiving who is talking. Speech carries information about both what is being said and who is saying it.”
Perceiving who is speaking is a key social component of communication and begins to develop early in life. To investigate differences between monolingual and bilingual children, Levi’s team tested 41 participants: 22 monolingual English speakers and 19 bilingual children. The bilingual participants all used English and either spoke or were regularly exposed to a second language other than German. Children were grouped by age into younger (nine years and under) and older (ten years and older) cohorts to assess developmental effects.
Participants completed several listening tasks designed to probe talker-voice perception. In a discrimination task, children listened to pairs of words spoken in a familiar language (English, spoken with a German accent) and an unfamiliar language (German). They judged whether each pair came from the same speaker or from two different speakers. In a separate learning task, children learned to associate the voices of three unfamiliar speakers with cartoon characters on a computer screen. After training, they heard a word and chose which cartoon character had spoken it, testing how well they learned and identified each voice.
Results showed clear effects of both age and bilingual experience. Older children outperformed younger children across tasks, confirming that talker-voice processing improves with development. Crucially, bilingual children showed superior performance compared with monolingual children on multiple measures. When listening to English (spoken with an accent), bilingual children were better at discriminating voices, learned speaker identities more quickly, and identified voices more accurately. When listening to the unfamiliar German, bilingual children were still better at discriminating between voices, demonstrating that the bilingual advantage extended to a language participants did not know.
Levi described several possible reasons for the bilingual advantage. Bilingual children may have more exposure to accented speech and a greater variety of phonetic patterns, improving their ability to separate speaker identity from linguistic content. They may also develop stronger cognitive control or attention skills from managing multiple languages, which helps focus on social cues in speech. Alternatively, bilingual children might have enhanced social perception abilities that support more efficient voice recognition.
“Our study tested voice processing in both a familiar and an unfamiliar language, and the bilingual advantage emerged in both cases,” Levi said. “While further research is needed to pinpoint the mechanisms, these results add to evidence that speaking multiple languages supports a broader range of perceptual and social-cognitive skills.”
About this research
Funding: The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, part of the National Institutes of Health (1R03DC009851-01A2).
Source: Rachel Harrison, NYU
Original research: “Another bilingual advantage? Perception of talker-voice information” by Susannah V. Levi, published online June 9, 2017 in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. DOI: 10.1017/S1366728917000153.
Abstract (concise)
This study evaluated whether bilingual children show advantages in processing talker-voice information, a social aspect of speech perception distinct from linguistic processing. Younger and older groups of monolingual and bilingual children completed a voice discrimination task in English and German and a talker-voice learning task in English. Results showed that older children outperformed younger children and bilingual children outperformed monolingual children across tasks. These findings indicate a bilingual advantage in perceiving who is speaking, not just in language processing but in social-perceptual aspects of speech.
Understanding how bilingual experience shapes voice recognition and social perception can inform educational approaches and deepen knowledge of how language exposure influences broader cognitive and perceptual development.