Effect of linguistic interference on sentence identification.

This study was designed to investigate the extent to which continuous speech competition, in sentence identification paradigm, produces linguistic interference over and above acoustic masking. We evaluated performance on the Synthetic Sentence Identification (SSI) test in 24 bilingual speakers of English and Spanish under four experimental conditions: (1) target and competition both in English, (2) target and competition both in Spanish, (3) target in English, competition in Spanish, and (4) target in Spanish, competition in English. After controlling for the effects of acoustic masking, results showed significantly better performance in conditions when target and competition were in different languages (interlingual interference) than when target and competition were in the same language (intralingual interference). The difference in performance is attributed to the effects of greater linguistic interference when target and competition were in the same language.