Phonetic accommodation in Russian-Estonian bilingual speech

Abstract

The influence of L1 phonological knowledge on L2 bilingual speech has long been a fruitful topic of speech perception and production research (Piske et al., J. Phonetics 29, 191–215). Recent research examining phonetic accommodation in bilingual speech has demonstrated that L1 and L2 phonologies interact in a bidirectional, dynamic manner (Fowler et al., J. Phonetics 36, 649–663). My study builds on these results by examining the acoustic outcomes of phonetic accommodation in vowels produced by bilingual Russian(L1)-Estonian(L2) speakers. Specifically, I aim to test the hypotheses that L2 knowledge can significantly affect robust aspects of L1 speech, i.e., vowel quality, and that there is a correlation between the extent of L2 exposure and the degree of phonetic accommodation. The preliminary results of acoustic analysis suggest that bilingual speakers produce L1 vowels with formant values that are intermediate from both L1 and L2 monolingual controls, indicating that L2 exposure influences significant aspects of L1 speech. Presently, I am conducting analyses which compare individual speaker differences in the extent of phonetic convergence to the amount of their L2 use and exposure. My overarching objective is to present novel empirical evidence that expands our current understanding of phonetic accommodation in bilingual speech production.