Stop consonant production of French immersion students in Western Canada: A study of voice onset time

Abstract

Objectives/research questions: The present study investigates the development of French stop consonants among English-speaking children who are enrolled in an early French immersion program in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Our goal is to observe the stop consonant production pattern, and to determine whether interactions between the two language systems occur, while examining student progression with increasing experience. Methodology: Fifty-six students in grades 1, 3, and 5 participated in a speech production task administered in both English and French. For each language, they were asked to repeat a total of 54 words beginning with one of the six stop consonants, /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, and /g/. In addition, 45 age-matched monolingual English-speaking children were tested to serve as a control group. Data and analysis: Voice onset time (VOT) was the acoustic measure analyzed for each language and for children of each grade. An analysis of variance was conducted for language- and experience-related effects. Conclusions: For the French voiceless stops, French immersion students display non-native-like VOT values in the intermediate range between monolingual English voiced and voiceless stops. Their English voiceless stops exhibit higher VOT values than the monolinguals’ and are separate from those of their French. For voiced stops, their English and French are indistinguishable, located within the range of voiced stops for monolingual English speakers. Originality: Previous research on French–English bilingualism has generally been limited to adults. Furthermore, examination of French immersion students has rarely focused on their phonetic development, and acoustic analysis of this population is virtually non-existent. Implications: Our results highlight the importance of input, as well as social, and educational context in second language learning.

Role of Regional Language Background and Speech Styles on the Production of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in English among Indonesian Multilinguals

“…In the area of phonological acquisition, one of the most extensive explorations is the acquisition of VOT; Kehoe et al (2004), for example, measured the VOT production of word-initial stop consonants of German by four German-Spanish bilingual children and compared them to the three monolingual German peers using naturalistic speech recordings. Similarly, Fabiano- Smith and Goldstein (2010) Departing from the different patterns of VOT in the two languages, children in these previous studies were found to demonstrate the followings: in the German-English data, they indicated (1) delay in the phonetic realization of voicing, (2) transfer of voicing features, and (3) no cross-language influence in the phonetic realization (Kehoe et al, 2004), in the Spanish-English, (1) monolingual and bilingual children generally differed on VOT in English, but not in Spanish and (2) no statistically significant differences were found between the Spanish and the English VOT of the bilingual children, but the VOT values did differ significantly for monolingual Spanish-versus monolingual English-speaking participants (Fabiano- Smith & Goldstein, 2010), whereas in the French-English data, (1) for the French voiceless stops, French immersion students display nonnative-like VOT values in the intermediate range between monolingual English voiced and voiceless stops, (2) their English voiceless stops exhibit higher VOT values than the monolinguals' and are separate from those of their French, (3) for voiced stops, their English and French are indistinguishable, located within the range of voiced stops for monolingual English speakers (Netelenbos et al, 2015). These findings have provided important insights into how cross-linguistic interaction takes place during the acquisition of nonnative language VOTs.…”

Cross-linguistic similarity in L2 speech learning: Evidence from the acquisition of Russian stop contrasts by Mandarin speakers

“…Nonetheless, English speakers whose L1 is also an aspirating language could exhibit more variable performances in learning L2 prevoiced stops. Netelenbos et al (2016) found that despite an increase in immersion learning experience, the acquisition of French initial prevoiced stops was still challenging for English-speaking children, insofar as their mean VOT was 8.9 ms. Likewise, an overall lack of prevoicing in Spanish initial voiced stops was reported by Zampini (1998), who investigated the production of Spanish initial stops by English learners.…”

“…For the IPA comparison method, one of the problems it has to deal with is that IPA can be used both as broad or narrow transcriptions that may differ in some scenarios, e.g. the phonetic realization of English word initial stop contrasts /b d g/ vs. /p t k/ could be narrowly transcribed as [p t k] vs. [p h t h k h ] (Beckman et al, 2013; Netelenbos et al, 2016). The choice of broad or narrow transcriptions in IPA can render disagreement in predicting similarity, which can cause uncertainty.…”

“…VOT is an acoustic measurement of the time interval between the beginning of voicing and the release burst of stops (Beckman et al, 2013; Lisker and Abramson, 1964). Voiced stops have negative VOT values spanning from −150 ms to 0 ms as prevoicing; voiceless unaspirated stops possess VOT values between 0 ms and 30 ms as short lags, and when the VOT values are markedly longer than 30 ms, the stops become voiceless aspirated with long lags (Netelenbos et al, 2016). As attested by numerous empirical studies, VOT is one of the most critical acoustic parameters differentiating between various stop categories, and the realization of VOTs can generally decide the quality and accentedness of corresponding L2 stop production (Beckman et al, 2013; Flege and Eefting, 1987a, 1987b; Lisker and Abramson, 1964; Major, 1987; Riney and Takagi, 1999; van Alphen and Smits, 2004).…”

“…Previous studies investigating the acquisition of true voice stop contrasts by adult learners with an aspirating first language (L1) have been primarily concerned with English speakers as the L2 learners (Nagle, 2019; Netelenbos et al, 2016; Zampini, 1998). However, stops in English and Mandarin are quite different, despite both languages being aspirating.…”