Does bilingualism help trilingualism in phonetic perception?

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question of whether bilingual speakers learn a third language more easily than monolinguals. For this, we narrowed down our research interest to Arabic-English bilingual speakers’ perception of the phonetic contrasts in Korean. We have conducted the perception experiment in which native Arabic speakers are grouped into monolinguals and late-bilinguals of English, and are asked to discriminate a different speech sound among three Korean syllables. We cross-classified the subjects’ responses in a multi-way frequency table defined by five categorical variables; i.e. group (monolingual vs. bilingual), syllable structure (V vs. hV), target stimulus position (initial vs. final), contrast pairs of Korean vowels (/a-ʌ, /a-e/, /ʌ-i/, /o-ʌ/, /u-o/, /u-i/, /i-e/, /i-i/), and response (correct vs. incorrect). The log-linear regression analysis indicates robust L1 transfer effects on L3, but we found no significant difference between monolingual and bilingual speakers. Considering the general interest in multi-lingualism among the public and people’s vague belief that bilingualism may help trilingualism, the findings of this paper have significance not only for the field of second language acquisition, but for pedagogical purposes as well.