Phonetic accommodation in Spanish-English and Korean-English bilinguals

Abstract

Preliminary results from eight participants in a cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic accommodation in speech production and perception are presented. The finding that synchronous actions are more stable than asynchronous ones has been reported in studies of general [Kelso (1981)] and speech-specific [Browman and Goldstein (1992), Byrd et al. (2009)] motor control. With reference to glottal-oral timing, near-zero VOTs (voice onset times) are representative of near-synchronous timing, whereas long-lag VOTs are representative of asynchronous timing [Sawashima and Hirose (1980), Dixit (1984), Lofqvist and Yoshioka (1989), Fuchs (2005)]. These observations served as a basis for the prediction that native speakers of Korean, with its long-lag aspirated stops (~120 ms), would more readily accommodate to typical English voiceless stop VOT (~70 ms) than native speakers of Spanish, with its short-lag voiceless stops (~20 ms). Spanish-English and Korean-English bilinguals were recorded reading voiceless stop-initial English words, before and during a task in which participants shadowed recorded productions of a native speaker of American English. Preliminary analysis of the production data provides some support for these hypotheses. The results contribute to our understanding of the conditions that promote phonetic accommodation.