Language
context affects different kinds of bilinguals differently at the preattentive
level in speech perception. Bilinguals from birth (balanced bilinguals) perceive
their languages in both language contexts similarly, which indicates that they have
one unified phonological system. In contrast, bilinguals who have learned their
second language in a classroom (dominant bilinguals) perceive speech according
to separate, language specific systems and have separate phonological systems
for the two languages. The present study focuses on speech production in
similar kinds of bilinguals. We used three different language contexts,
monolingual Finnish and Swedish and a bilingual context, in speech production
tasks. Language context effects are seen in speech production of both bilingual
groups. The difference in mother tongue identity is also shown as the dominant
bilinguals differ from the balanced bilinguals in the production of Swedish
vowels between monolingual and bilingual language contexts.