Influence of language dominance on Filipinos' categorical perception of English phonemes

Abstract

The present study deals with the perception of an English phonemic contrast of /b/ and /v/ (as in boat and vote) by Filipinos living in Singapore and the Philippines who are familiar with English and at least one language of the Philippines. A principal component analysis was done to create a composite score of language dominance for each of the participants based on their responses to a language background questionnaire. As /b/ and /v/ are not phonemically contrasted in most languages of the Philippines, it was hypothesized that participants who were more dominant in English would be better than those who were more dominant in a language of the Philippines at discriminating between /b/ and /v/ in an auditory discrimination task. As no significant effect of language dominance on accuracy and reaction time was observed, the hypothesis was not supported. However, an exploratory analysis identified several variables in the language background questionnaire that had significant correlations with either accuracy and reaction time, making them promising candidates for future research on categorical perception of phonemes on multilinguals. These variables include age at which English was first learnt, years spent in a region where English is the dominant language, years spent in a workplace where a language of the Philippines is the dominant language, percentage of time speaking to friends in English and percentage of time spent consuming media in English.