Voicing-dependent vowel duration in English and French: Monolingual and bilingual production

Abstract

It is well established in English phonology that vowels preceding voiceless consonants are approximately two-thirds the duration of vowels preceding voiced consonants when these vowels occur in stressed prepausal environments. It is claimed that such a large voicing-dependent effect does not exist in certain other languages, such as French. However, in previous studies, the syllabic and phonemic structures of the stimuli used for cross-language comparison have not been held constant. Therefore, it was the purpose of this study to compare durational effects in English and French stimulus words having the same syllabic structure and, to the extent possible, the same phonemic structure. An additional issue of the study was the ability of bilinguals to utilize the English durational rule. Computer analysis of 854 stimulus words revealed that (1) there were larger context-dependent differences in preconsonantal vowel duration in English than in French, and (2) the English and French vowel duration ratios of French–English bilinguals were essentially like those of French monolinguals. However, the bilinguals’ English vowels were longer than their French vowels.