Semantic facilitation in bilingual everyday speech comprehension

Previous research suggests that bilinguals presented with low and high predictability sentences benefit from semantics in clear but not in conversational speech [1]. In everyday speech, how­ ever, many words are not highly predictable. Previous research has shown that native listeners can use also more subtle seman­ tic contextual information [2]. The present study reports two au­ ditory lexical decision experiments investigating to what extent late Asian-English bilinguals benefit from subtle semantic cues in their processing of English unreduced and reduced speech. Our results indicate that these bilinguals are less sensitive to se­ mantic cues than native listeners for both speech registers.