Bilingual speech production: The case of simultaneous acquisition

Abstract

Despite increased interest in people learning a second language (L2) in the past decade or two, there have been few studies investigating production by bilinguals at the segmental level. In this experiment coronal stop consonants in real-word productions in French and English by bilingual French–English speakers, very fluent in both languages having learned the two languages simultaneously since birth, were recorded. Differences in the phonetics of Canadian French and English include VOT and place of articulation distinctions. Canadian French has a two-way voicing distinction between prevoiced and simultaneous release stops and uses the dental place of articulation. Canadian English, on the other hand, has a two-way voicing distinction (in syllable initial position) between simultaneous and aspirated release for stops and uses an alveolar place of articulation. Acoustic analyses of stop consonants for both VOT and place of articulation (dental versus alveolar) are reported. Productions by bilinguals will be compared with those of respective monolingual groups for similarities and differences. Results will be discussed with respect to Grosjean’s wholistic-fractionated classification of the bilingual system [F. Grosjean, Brain and Language 36, 3–15 (1989)].