Patterns of Short-Term Phonetic Interference in Bilingual Speech

Šárka Šimáčková,Václav Podlipský

doi:10.3390/languages3030034

Abstract

Previous research indicates that alternating between a bilingual’s languages during speech production can lead to short-term increases in cross-language phonetic interaction. However, discrepancies exist between the reported L1–L2 effects in terms of direction and magnitude, and sometimes the effects are not found at all. The present study focused on L1 interference in L2, examining Voice Onset Time (VOT) of English voiceless stops produced by L1-dominant Czech-English bilinguals—interpreter trainees highly proficient in L2-English. We tested two hypotheses: (1) switching between languages induces an immediate increase in L1 interference during code-switching; and (2) due to global language co-activation, an increase in L1-to-L2 interference occurs when bilinguals interpret (translate) a message from L1 into L2 even if they do not produce L1 speech. Fourteen bilinguals uttered L2-English sentences under three conditions: L2-only, code-switching into L2, and interpreting into L2. Against expectation, the results showed that English VOT in the bilingual tasks tended to be longer and less Czech-like compared to the English-only task. This contradicts an earlier finding of L2 VOT converging temporarily towards L1 VOT values for comparable bilingual tasks performed by speakers from the same bilingual population. Participant-level inspection of our data suggests that besides language-background differences, individual language-switching strategies contribute to discrepancies between studies.

Highlights

This paper focuses on one specific bilingual situation and one specific type of bilingual speaker—advanced foreign language learners, namely native speakers of Czech who learned English at school
In the subsequent analyses of dual-language versus single-language productions we used the normalized Voice Onset Time (VOT) values to factor out speech tempo variation, here we want to inform about the actual VOT values
Considering long-term cross-language interference first, the data collected for this study confirm our earlier observation that some late L1-dominant Czech learners of English can learn to produce L2 voiceless stops in a native-like way (Šimáčková and Podlipský 2015), despite the fact that such a feat is usually reported for early bilinguals (e.g., Antoniou et al 2010) while there are numerous reports of late L2 learners typically producing intermediate VOT (e.g., Caramazza et al 1973; Flege 1987)

Summary

Introduction

This paper focuses on one specific bilingual situation and one specific type of bilingual speaker—advanced foreign language learners, namely native speakers of Czech who learned English at school. With the exception of one participant, they all started learning English by the age of eleven and they were late bilinguals, in the sense of coming into sustained contact with native speakers only in adolescence. Expected for such a type of bilinguals is the transfer of L1 features into their L2 (Green 1998; Linck et al 2012), which, on the level of sound, results in foreign-accentedness. We examined the phonetic influence of our learners’ L1 Czech on their English spoken productions in terms of one acoustic

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