An examination of articulatory skill in monolinguals and multilinguals: A tongue twister experiment

The main goal of this study is to determine whether articulatory differences exist between monolinguals (n = 19) and bilinguals (n = 21) through the analysis of tongue-twister production, following Goldrick & Blumstein (2006). The latter were divided into early bilinguals (consistent exposure to both of their languages before age 5, n = 8), mid bilinguals (exposure to L2 between 5 and 10 years, n = 5), late bilinguals (L2 exposure between 10 and 15 years, n = 3) and trilinguals (n = 5).The stimuli comprised 64 sequences that each contained four syllables (e.g., kif tif tif kif) and had to be repeated three times to a beat of a metronome (150 beats per minute). The recordings were rated by a trained listener, who gave a score of 1 for each accurately produced onset and coda consonant, and a score of 0 otherwise. In addition, a subset of the sounds produced were manually aligned in Praat to validate the raters' scoring and determine whether speakers also differed in less perceptible aspects of speech. The results show that while there are no overall differences in accuracy between the two groups (monolingual versus multilingual), bilinguals who were first exposed to their second language later in life (between 5 and 15) exhibit a statistically significant advantage in the articulation of tongue-twisters (Dugaillard & Spinu, 2019). Our findings underscore the importance of directly measuring bilingual language proficiency and incorporating this information to experimental design (DelMaschio & Abutalebi 2018, Sulpizio et al. 2019).