Heritage language exposure impacts voice onset time of Dutch–German simultaneous bilingual preschoolers

Antje Stoehr,Titia Benders,Paula Fikkert,Janet G Van Hell

doi:10.1017/s1366728917000116

Abstract

This study assesses the effects of age and language exposure on VOT production in 29 simultaneous bilingual children aged 3;7 to 5;11 who speak German as a heritage language in the Netherlands. Dutch and German have a binary voicing contrast, but the contrast is implemented with different VOT values in the two languages. The results suggest that bilingual children produce ‘voiced’ plosives similarly in their two languages, and these productions are not monolingual-like in either language. Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence between Dutch and German can explain these results. Yet, the bilinguals seemingly have two autonomous categories for Dutch and German ‘voiceless’ plosives. In German, the bilinguals’ aspiration is not monolingual-like, but bilinguals with more heritage language exposure produce more target-like aspiration. Importantly, the amount of exposure to German has no effect on the majority language's ‘voiceless’ category. This implies that more heritage language exposure is associated with more language-specific voicing systems.

Highlights

Introduction minority language these studies used adequateBilingual children’s realization of the voicing contrast has received substantial attention in language acquisition research during the past two decades, and consistently revealed differences from monolingual children’s voice onset time (VOT) production (Deuchar & Clark, 1996; Fabiano-Smith & Bunta, 2012; Johnson & Wilson, 2002; Kehoe, Lleó & Rakow, 2004; Khattab, 2000; McCarthy, Mahon, Rosen & Evans, 2014)
This section starts with the descriptive statistics before we turn to the statistical effects of Language and Language Background on VOT, taking into account the children’s age and, in case of the language comparison within the bilinguals, their exposure to German
The bilinguals’ similar production of prevoicing in both languages and the observed differences between bilinguals and monolinguals seem to be unrelated to variation in language exposure or age, and may instead result from CROSS-LINGUISTIC INFLUENCE (CLI)

Summary

Introduction

Bilingual children’s realization of the voicing contrast has received substantial attention in language acquisition research during the past two decades, and consistently revealed differences from monolingual children’s VOT production (Deuchar & Clark, 1996; Fabiano-Smith & Bunta, 2012; Johnson & Wilson, 2002; Kehoe, Lleó & Rakow, 2004; Khattab, 2000; McCarthy, Mahon, Rosen & Evans, 2014) These studies have been conducted on mainly small samples of bilinguals immersed in an aspiration language (i.e., English, except for Kehoe et al, 2004 on German) with a prevoicing language as the statistical analyses, they were not designed to statistically assess the effects of age or language exposure, which are important factors in monolingual and bilingual language acquisition (Armon-Lotem & Ohana, 2017; Gathercole & Hoff, 2007; Gathercole & Thomas, 2009; Mayr & Siddika, published online 17 October, 2016; Unsworth, 2013; Yu, De Nil & Pang, 2015). Outstanding issues in a sample of Dutch–German bilingual preschoolers that is large enough to allow for association analyses between the effects of both age and language

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion