This study compares results of monolingual English, bilingual Spanish-English, and bilingual Mandarin-English speakers on a series of nonword repetition, speech perception, and working memory tasks. Participants will complete an online survey where they will hear nonsense words, some with speech sounds that are present in both languages and some with speech sounds present only in English, and then are asked to type what they hear. Speech perception and working memory tasks are included to determine whether these elements affect results of the nonword repetition tasks. Since it is difficult to perceive sounds in a speaker’s second language (Goto, 1971; Dupoux et al., 1999), the anticipated results are that native English speakers will perform better than bilingual speakers, even though the stimuli are nonwords.

Nonword repetition tasks have been suggested as an unbiased dynamic language assessment for children of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (e.g., Dollaghan and Campbell, 1998; Chiat, 2015). Nonword repetition tasks are assumed to be unbiased in testing culturally and linguistically diverse populations because they do not include English words. However, the speech sounds included are typically from English (e.g., the NRT by Dollaghan & Campbell includes “v” and “f”, which are absent in Korean), potentially complicating the scoring of these tests for bilingual children whose first language does not include these sounds. The current study investigates the impact of including nonnative speech sounds in nonword repetition tasks among adults without language impairment.

Lauren would like to thank her faculty sponsor Elizabeth Roepke for their support of this project.