Navigating the bilingual cocktail party

A critical role for listeners’ L1 in the linguistic aspect of informational masking

Bibliographic Data

ID15087333
AuthorsEmilia Lew (0000-0003-4652-796X, Centre for Research on Brain Language and Music), Sophie Hallot (McGill University Health Centre), Krista Byers-Heinlein (0000-0002-7040-2510, Centre for Research on Brain Language and Music), Mickael Deroche (0000-0002-8698-2249, Centre for Research on Brain Language and Music, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume28
Issue3
Pages748-756
Publication date2025-05-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBilingualism Language and Cognition (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1366-7289 • E-ISSN: 1469-1841
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1366728924000944
OpenAlexW4405011544
LanguageEN
References cited51

Cocktail party environments require listeners to tune in to a target voice while ignoring surrounding speakers. This presents unique challenges for bilingual listeners who have familiarity with several languages. Our study recruited English-French bilinguals to listen to a male target speaking French or English, masked by two female voices speaking French, English or Tamil, or by speech-shaped noise, in a fully factorial design. Listeners struggled most with L1 maskers and least with foreign maskers. Critically, this finding held regardless of the target language (L1 or L2) challenging theories about the linguistic component of informational masking, which contrary to our results predicts stronger interference with greater target-to-masker similarity such as L2 vs L2 compared to L2 vs L1. Our findings suggest that the listener’s familiarity with the masker language is an important source of informational masking in multilingual environments

Art · Linguistics · Hearing Impairment and Communication · Hearing Loss and Rehabilitation · Multisensory perception and integration · Psychology

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