Introduction

Listening to speech is the communication skill we use most frequently. It has often been reported that of the four skills we use daily (speaking, listening, reading, and writing), it is perceiving and comprehending speech – in other words, going from the acoustic wave to a mental representation of what has been said – that is the most frequent. In addition, with the exception of Deaf children acquiring sign language, the vast majority of infants acquire language through listening. People who acquire and then use two or more languages in their everyday life are no different. The amount of time spent listening may in fact be greater for some bi‐ and multilinguals who do not know how to read and write in all of their languages, and consequently spend most of their time in the spoken modality.

A book such as this one, dedicated solely to spoken language processing in bilinguals, be they adults or children, is thus a necessity in the ever growing field of bilingualism research. It has several aims. The first is to bring together the various strands of spoken language processing in bilinguals, many of which are studied independently of one another: speech perception, word recognition and higher level processing, the perception of bilingual speech containing code‐switches, borrowings and interferences, as well as the assessment of speech perception and comprehension in bilingual adults and children. To achieve this aim, the main authors have benefited from the collaboration of guest authors who are experts in their own fields – Mark Antoniou, Theres Grüter, Robert Hartsuiker, Elizabeth Peña and Lisa Bedore, and Lu‐Feng Shi.

The second aim is to introduce readers to the approaches used in the study of speech perception and comprehension in bilinguals, most notably experimentation involving both well‐established tasks and newer tasks, as well as techniques used in brain imaging. In all the chapters, the authors present the approaches and methodology used in their domains by taking illustrative studies and describing them in some detail. This allows us to do away with specific sections on methodology, which can be rather dry when isolated from the issues of interest. Finally, the third aim is to present the various aspects of spoken language processing in bilinguals in a clear, informative and pedagogical manner. Much of the research we cover has been presented in academic journals, which have presentation formats and styles that are not always transparent. We have worked hard to make this research accessible to our readers.

The book begins with an introductory chapter, Chapter 1, which gives a brief overview of bilingual adults and children and lays the foundations for a better understanding of how they perceive and comprehend speech. It also describes various aspects of language knowledge and processing that they bring to the studies they take part in. It is followed by a shorter chapter, Chapter 2, which gives an overview of speech perception and comprehension in bilingual adults and children when they process two or more languages, either separately or together in the form of mixed speech. It describes the general architecture involved in speech processing and discusses the issues that are common to all processing levels in bilinguals. It also outlines how first language acquisition takes place in children.

The book is then organized into two parts. Part I concerns speech processing in adults. Chapter 3, written by Mark Antoniou, reviews speech perception by bilingual listeners and examines the factors that have been shown to affect it, such as age of acquisition, language use, proficiency, and language mode. It also provides an overview of the models used to explain the perceptual patterns of bilinguals and discusses the literature on the perception of prosody in those listeners. Chapter 4 discusses how word recognition takes place in bilinguals and reviews the factors that play a role in how well bilinguals recognize words in their two languages. Among these we find those present at other levels of processing (language proficiency, use, and history) but also the nature of the input that comes from the speech perception level, the activation level of the language not being processed, and so on. Chapter 5, authored by Robert Hartsuiker, discusses the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of speech processing in bilinguals. It examines, among other things, how bilinguals undertake syntactic analysis and build the sentence structure, how they process the meaning of words, their use of prediction, and the role they give to pragmatics in auditory comprehension. Chapter 6 concentrates on the perception and comprehension of bilingual mixed speech, that is speech that contains code‐switches, borrowings, and interferences. It examines whether the perception of code‐switches takes extra processing time, the processes by which code‐switches and borrowings are recognized, as well as the perception of interferences. The final chapter of this first part, Chapter 7, written by Lu‐Feng Shi, discusses the assessment of adult bilingual speech perception and comprehension in the clinical context. Topics covered are how to assess bilinguals effectively and efficiently, the processing of words and connected speech in various test conditions, as well as the relationship between the language background of bilinguals and their assessment performance.

Part II concentrates on speech processing in bilingual children. Chapter 8 explores how bilingual infants and children perceive and process speech in their languages, and how this changes with experience. The chapter covers the development of language discrimination, the perception of speech sounds, both consonants and vowels, the processing of tone and lexical stress, as well as the development of phonological awareness. Chapter 9 discusses how bilingual infants and children learn and recognize spoken words. It examines how children locate words in the auditory speech stream, link those words to meaning, and then recognize familiar words in real‐time speech. It also looks at how they apply their speech perception skills to learn similar‐sounding words, and discusses the development of vocabulary size and structure. Chapter 10, written by Theres Grüter, provides an overview of bilingual children’s comprehension and processing at the sentence level. Among the topics discussed are the asymmetry between expressive and receptive skills, as well as the roles of cross‐linguistic influence, the variability in input, and the development of higher level skills. Finally, Chapter 11, authored by Elizabeth Peña and Lisa Bedore, focuses on how researchers and clinicians assess the vocabulary and semantic knowledge of bilingual children. Accurate assessment is important for describing children’s language abilities and for identifying those with language impairment. It becomes a real challenge to determine whether the overall language development of bilingual children is progressing at the expected rate in comparison to their monolingual peers.

Two points need to be made here. First, to our knowledge, there is no book dedicated exclusively to speech perception and comprehension in bilinguals that covers both adults and children. By offering such a book, we hope that it will encourage researchers working on adults and those working on children to learn about the other branch of bilingual psycholinguistics and that it will foster collaboration between the two. Second, by adding two chapters on the clinical assessment of bilinguals, one on adults and the other on children, we hope that our book will be of use not only to colleagues and their students involved in basic research but also to those who are more clinically oriented. If, as a side product, more interaction between the two takes place in the future, we would be the first to applaud this result.

This book can be used for courses in psycholinguistics, linguistics, cognitive sciences, speech and language pathology, bilingualism, applied linguistics, and first and second language acquisition. It is suitable for upper level BA and BS courses, first‐ and second‐year graduate studies, as well as for the laypersons who wish to find out about speech perception and comprehension in bilingual adults and children.

We would like to end by thanking our guest authors who very kindly accepted to take part in this book project and write chapters for the level of reader at which the book is aimed. They have done a wonderful job integrating their chapters into the book and for this we are grateful to them. This book would not have been possible without the initial support and encouragement of Danielle Descoteaux, Senior Acquisitions Editor at Wiley. We thank her wholeheartedly. Her successors, Mark Calley and Tanya McMullin, took on the project with enthusiasm and were also of great help. The project editors, Julia Kirk, Manish Lutra, and Nivetha Udayakumar, the editorial assistants, Elizabeth Saucier and Maddie Koufogazos, and the copyeditor, Patricia Bateson, have all been extremely supportive and we are very grateful to them.

When the preparation of a book such as this one spans a number of years, there are bound to be moments of joy and moments of sadness. We went through an especially sad moment when one of our guest authors, Lu‐Feng Shi, passed away. He was a wonderful colleague to work with and he did a tremendous job despite his failing health in his last year. We will sorely miss him. However, we also went through moments of great joy during these years with, notably, the birth...