Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Proficient bilingual listening requires differential processing of sound variation in each language context. We consid-ered context-based processing of pitch information by Mandarin-English bilinguals, for whom pitch indicates word distinctionsin one language but not the other. In an eye-tracked word-learning experiment, 58 bilinguals and 28 English monolinguals eachlearned English-like and Mandarin-like wordsets, words referring to images. Wordsets differed primarily in that English-likewords contained final consonants. We explained that some words might differ only in their pitch patterns, and included train-ing on minimal tone pairs. In test, two pictures appeared on the screen with referents differing in either tone or vowel. Onepicture was labeled. Bilinguals processed tones more efficiently (t(78) = 3.54, p = .001) and more accurately (t(84) = 3.78, p <.001) than monolinguals only in the Mandarin context. Mandarin-English bilinguals thus appear to tailor tone processing to thewithin-word language context.