Monolingual-Mode English, Monolingual-Mode French, and Bilingual-Mode Stimuli Used (Wilson & Gick, 2014)

Purpose Previous work has shown that monolingual French and English speakers use distinct articulatory settings, the underlying articulatory posture of a language. In the present article, the authors report on an experiment in which they investigated articulatory settings in bilingual speakers. The authors first tested the hypothesis that in order to sound native-like, bilinguals must use distinct, language-specific articulatory settings in monolingual mode. The authors then tested the hypothesis that in bilingual mode, a bilingual individual's articulatory setting is identical to the monolingual-mode setting of 1 of his or her languages. Method Eight French–English bilinguals each read 90 English and 90 French sentences, and the authors measured their interspeech posture (ISP) using optical tracking of the lips and jaw and ultrasound imaging of the tongue.