How homophonous are interlingual homophones? An acoustic and perceptual inquiry

Interlingual homophones (IHs) are cross-linguistic word pairs with the “same” phonological forms but distinct meanings. This phonological similarity may lead to perceptual ambiguity for bilingual listeners. Prior studies have demonstrated that listeners can use language-specific phonetic cues to resolve IH ambiguity, but few have quantified the acoustic similarity or examined their perceptual distinctiveness in unilingual versus code-switching sentential contexts. This study investigates Mandarin–English IHs with both acoustic analysis and perception experiments. We hypothesize that (1) smaller acoustic distances between IH pairs will increase perceptual ambiguity, and (2) listeners will bias their interpretation toward the language of the carrier sentence. IH candidates were systematically extracted from corpora and recorded by a phonetically trained and highly proficient Mandarin–English bilingual. Acoustic similarity was quantified using absement. Perceptual judgments were collected using a Visual Analog Scale (VAS), with bilingual participants evaluating IHs presented in isolation and in Mandarin or English sentential contexts. Results are discussed in relation to acoustic distance, language-specific phonetic cue utilization, and sentence-level prediction in bilingual speech processing.