Specificity of Phonemic Perception of Bilingual Learners

Abstract

According to various sources, from 277 to 295 different languages are used in the Russian Federation, which makes it very important to assess the impact of bilingualism on speech perception, for example, in the context of school education. There is conflicting evidence about how bilingual children recognize individual phonemes. We compared the perception of phonemes of the Russian language by ear in children of early school age from a monolingual (Russian-speaking) and bilingual (Russian-speaking and Ossetian-speaking) environment using the speech test "Clinical assessment of the development of basic linguistic competencies" and psychophysical tasks for distinguishing words in noise. Bilingual children were found to be worse at repeating pseudowords and recognizing phonemes in stationary noise. The reasons for the difficulties may be related to the fact that children growing up in a bilingual environment have a much wider list of phonemes that need to be recognized than children growing up in a monolingual environment. This can lead to reduced speech recognition in the language of instruction and, consequently, a possible decrease in the quality of education.