Quantifying the consonantal voicing effect: Vowel duration in an Italian–American community

Abstract

Cross-linguistically, vowel duration preceding voiced consonants is greater than that preceding voiceless consonants, all else equal (Chen 1970, Mack 1982). Notably, this consonantal voicing effect is larger for English, a presumed instance of language-specific phonological enhancement of a basic phonetic process. The current study asks whether bilingual speakers maintain separate durational settings, and compares consonantal voicing effects across languages in two participant groups: foreign-born Italian speakers who acquired English as young adults, and US-born speakers from the same community who had simultaneous childhood exposure to Italian and English. The complete materials set employed familiar words, e.g., English rib/rip; Italian cubico/cupola, and sampled systematically over vowel height and consonantal place; data reported are drawn from the high-vowel materials subset only. For targets uttered within language-appropriate carrier phrases, both groups exhibited the consonantal voicing effect in each language; both also exhibited the same interaction with language, producing reliably larger effects in English, suggesting that language-specific settings were attained. But crucially, where foreign-born speakers produced a purely phonetic effect in Italian, US-born speakers suppressed phonological enhancement only partially. These findings, plausibly reflecting a degree of interplay between phonologies, are discussed in terms of the circumstances of language learning.