Abstract
This study examines age of acquisition (AoA) in Spanish-English bilinguals’ phonetic and phonological knowledge of /l/ in English and Spanish. In English, the lateral approximant /l/ varies in darkness by context [based on the second formant (F2) and the difference between F2 and the first formant (F1)], but the Spanish /l/ does not. Further, English /l/ is overall darker than Spanish /l/. Thirty-eight college-aged adults participated: 11 Early Spanish-English bilinguals who learned English before the age of 5 years, 14 Late Spanish-English bilinguals who learned English after the age of 6 years, and 13 English monolinguals. Participants’ /l/ productions were acoustically analyzed by language and context. The results revealed a Spanish-to-English phonetic influence on /l/ productions for both Early and Late bilinguals, as well as an English-to-Spanish phonological influence on the patterning of /l/ for the Late Bilinguals. These findings are discussed in terms of the Speech Learning Model and the effect of AoA on the interaction between a bilingual speaker’s two languages.
Highlights
The one exception is WF position in Spanish, which for both Early and Late Bilinguals is lower than what is reported in prior studies
The following sections present the results of the between-group comparisons for English and Spanish as well as the within-group comparisons for the Early and Late Bilinguals for normalized F2 and raw F2-F1 differences
The goal of this study was to evaluate the phonetic and phonological characteristics of Spanish and English /l/ productions by two groups of bilinguals who differed in their age of acquisition (AoA) of English
Summary
It is widely established that a bilingual’s two languages interact; this interaction happens during the acquisition process for both children and adults, and continues after the languages have been mastered with native-like competence (Paradis, 2001a,b; Cook, 2003; Flege et al, 2003; Fabiano and Goldstein, 2005; Flege, 2007; Barlow et al, 2013) Such interaction has been described at numerous levels of linguistic structure, from pragmatic to syntactic to lexical to phonological (e.g., Pavlenko and Jarvis, 2002; Cook, 2003; Dussias, 2003; Flege et al, 2003; Dussias and Sagarra, 2007; Flege, 2007; Amengual, 2012). The nature and extent of interaction depends on the age of the speaker, the age at which each language was acquired, the amount of input and output in both languages, and the level of proficiency and dominance in the two languages (e.g., Flege, 1991, 2002; Flege et al, 1995, 1997, 1999, 2002; Thornburgh and Ryalls, 1998; Guion, 2003; Fowler et al, 2008; Simonet, 2010; Antoniou et al, 2011; Lee and Iverson, 2012)
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