Effects of childhood exposure to a second language on the production of voice onset time and closure duration.

Abstract

This study compares the production of voice onset time (VOT) and closure duration for singletons and geminates in Japanese by English‐speaking university students who were exposed to Japanese in an immersion program in childhood and those regular university students who had no previous exposure to Japanese. 20 informants enrolled in a third‐year Japanese were asked to repeat several target words including initial /p, t, k/ for VOT, and medials /p, t, k/ and /pp, tt, kk/ for singletons and geminates in a sentence frame. Both VOT of the initial stops and closure duration of the medial stops were measured. The results show that the immersion graduates’ VOT values in Japanese were shorter (i.e., more Japanese‐like) than those of the learners who had had no exposure to Japanese in childhood (p<0.05). For the production of closure duration, although the learners of Japanese without childhood L2 experience did not distinguish singletons from geminates, the immersion graduates did (p<0.005). The findings may suggest that long‐term benefits of L2 experience in childhood in the naturalistic setting, which were found in the work of Knightly et al. (2003), may also apply to the instructional setting like immersion education.