The connection between executive function and phonetic and phonological learning in monolingual and bilingual speakers

Recent work shows bilingual speakers exhibit an advantage in phonetic and phonological learning (PPL) compared to monolinguals. Specifically, bilinguals displayed stronger subcortical encoding of sound when processing speech stimuli (Krizman et al., 2012), and outperformed monolinguals in speech perception tasks (Tremblay and Sabourin, 2012). Bilinguals also displayed an advantage in learning vocabularies that differentiated words using foreign phonetic contrasts (Antoniou et al., 2015), and various aspects of novel accent pronunciation with both natural and artificial accents (Spinu et al., 2018, 2020). The current study explores the mechanisms underlying these enhanced skills by aiming to establish whether a correlation exists between PPL and higher-order cognitive abilities (i.e., executive functions) already shown to be enhanced in bilinguals: attentional control and inhibition (Bialystok, 2017). Our experiment explores the learning of two new segmental patterns in an artificial accent of English (following Spinu et al., 2020) in 20 monolingual English speakers and 20 early Spanish-English bilinguals from NYC. We also compare participants' accent learning scores with performance on two classic tasks that assess executive functioning (EF). By revealing a connection between PPL and EF, we add to the body of work on PPL in general, and the bilingual advantage in particular.