Perception and Production of Stops in Bilinguals and Unilinguals

Abstract

Cross-language studies have shown that voice onset time (VOT) is a sufficient acoustic cue to separate initial stop consonants into phonemic categories. The present study is an attempt to investigate further the efficacy of VOT as a linguistic cue by examining the perception and production of stop consonants in three groups of subjects: unilingual Quebec French, unilingual Quebec English, and bilingual French-English speakers. Perception was studied through a labeling procedure using synthetically produced stop+vowel syllables. Production was assessed through spectrographic measurements of VOT in word-initial stops. The six stop consonants of each language were investigated. The two groups of unilingual subjects had different perceptual functions and the bilinguals' responses were in an intermediate position. The production data indicate that VOT can separate between the English phonemic categories of /p,t,k/ and /b,d,g/, but this measure was not adequate for the Quebec French stop categories. In addition, the data show that language switching in bilinguals is well controlled at the production level but poorly controlled at the perception level. [Research supported in part by National Research Council of Canada and PHS research grant from NINDS.]