Dr. Kamli Gonzales from theUniversityofArizonagave a talk on language-differentiating cues in bilingual speech perception at theNationalKeyResearchCenterfor Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies on September 26, 2013.

Dr. Gonzales used Spanish ‘p’ and English ‘b’ as examples of phonetic differences between languages and suggests that bilinguals establish separate systems for the two languages as a strategy to the structural incompatibility. He also pointed out that cues might modulate the switching between two languages. For example, in his studies with Spanish-English and French-English bilinguals, he found that both groups of bilinguals showed separate spoken language system, and explicit cues (verbal instructions) and implicit cues (language-specific pronunciations) benefit language switching. His recent published work with twelve-month babies revealed that infants formed two spoken language system when they heard stimuli from two different speakers, which lends support to his hypothesis that bilinguals have separate spoken language systems.

The audience showed great interest in Dr. Gonzales’ studies and asked questions about bilingual’s separate systems, contextual cues and experiment details. Dr. Gonzales kindly shared his research experiences with the interested teachers and students.