The acquisition of a new phonological contrast: the case of stop consonants in French-English bilinguals.

Abstract

Cross-language studies have shown that Voice Onset Time (VOT) is a sufficient cue to separate initial stop consonants into phonemic categories. The present study used VOT as a linguistic cue in examining the perception and production of stop consonants in three groups of subjects: unilingual Canadian French, unilingual Canadian English, and bilingual French-English speakers. Perception was studied by having subjects label synthetically produced stop-vowel syllables while production was assessed through spectrographic measurements of VOT in word-initial stops. Six stop consonants, common to both languages, were used for these tasks. On the perception task, the two groups of unilingual subjects showed different perceptual crossovers with those of the bilinguals occupying an intermediate position. The production data indicate that VOT measures can separate voicing contrasts for speakers of Canadian English, but not for speakers of Canadian French. The data also show that language switching in bilinguals is well controlled for production but poorly controlled for perception at the phonological level.