Proficient bilinguals require more information for vowel identification than monolinguals

Even proficient bilinguals have been shown to experience more difficulty understanding speech in noise than monolinguals. One potential explanation is that bilinguals require more information than monolinguals for phoneme identification. We tested this hypothesis by presenting gated, silent‐center vowels to two groups of listeners: (1) monolingual American English speakers and (2) proficient Spanish–English bilinguals, who spoke unaccented or mildly accented English. To create the stimuli, two American English speakers were recorded as they read the following items: ‘‘beeb, bibb, babe, bebb, babb,’’ and ‘‘bob.’’ Duration‐preserved silent‐center versions of three tokens of each item were created by retaining varying amounts of the CV and VC transitions (10, 20, 30, or 40 ms) and attenuating the remainder of the vowel center to silence. Duration‐neutral versions of silent‐center tokens were created by lengthening or shortening the silent portion to match the tokens vowel duration to the average for all the ...