Voicing patterns in stops among heritage speakers of Western Armenian in Lebanon and the US

Abstract

Research on Western Armenian (WA) has described it as having a contrast between voiceless aspirated stops and voiced stops (Fairbanks 1948; Vaux 1998; Baronian 2017). Since there is no monolingual community of WA, all speakers are part of a minority language community, and also speak the majority language. The current study examines speakers from two heritage communities of WA: one in Lebanon, where the majority language is Arabic, and one in the US, where the majority language is English. The speakers in Lebanon were found to have a contrast between voiced and voiceless unaspirated stops, in line with Lebanese Arabic. The speakers in the US were more variable, some having the English pattern of voiceless unaspirated and voiceless aspirated stops, while others had voiceless aspirated stops, but their voiced stops were variable between voiced and voiceless unaspirated. These results indicate L2 transfer in both communities, leading to two different patterns of voicing in WA.

Modeling Heritage Language Phonetics and Phonology: Toward an Integrated Multilingual Sound System

“…In the next Section 4.2, I discuss ambiguous outcomes of similar phonological processes, final laryngeal neutralization, in Toronto Polish and the local English (Łyskawa et al 2016). Finally, in Section 4.3, I review asymmetric laryngeal patterns of Western Armenian, a HL spoken in Lebanon and in the US and in contact with Voicing (Arabic) and Aspirating (English) languages (Kelly and Keshishian 2021). The goal of this survey is to demonstrate the value of the integrated multilingual sound system for analysing HL sound systems, and to discuss limitations on what we can determine about HL phonology based largely on surface-level phonetics.…”

“…A critical component for furthering our understanding of the underlying structures and characteristics of heritage languages is through examination of patterns in a variety of contact scenarios, or dyads (Scontras and Putnam 2020). Kelly and Keshishian (2021) make an important contribution with their investigation of Western Armenian (WA) laryngeal features in two bilingual settings: for HSs with (i) Arabic and (ii) English as the MajL. They find surface patterns that clearly align with the MajL phonological systems: Voicing for Arabic and Aspirating for English (Kelly and Keshishian 2021).…”

“…Kelly and Keshishian (2021) make an important contribution with their investigation of Western Armenian (WA) laryngeal features in two bilingual settings: for HSs with (i) Arabic and (ii) English as the MajL. They find surface patterns that clearly align with the MajL phonological systems: Voicing for Arabic and Aspirating for English (Kelly and Keshishian 2021). Yet, the extent to which the contrastive representations of the WA has undergone changes in one or either setting remains unclear based on phonetics alone.…”

“…6 A comparison of these systems is presented in Table 6. Kelly and Keshishian (2021) show that when one of these underlying systems is in contact with Arabic in Lebanon, speakers implement the contrast as voiced [b d g] and voiceless [p t k]; in the US, however, speakers have aspirated [p h t h k h ] and vary between fully voiced [b d g] and plain [p t k]. It is undeniable that HL bilingualism influences the phonetic patterns of WA stops to align more closely to the MajL (Kelly and Keshishian 2021).…”

“…Kelly and Keshishian (2021) show that when one of these underlying systems is in contact with Arabic in Lebanon, speakers implement the contrast as voiced [b d g] and voiceless [p t k]; in the US, however, speakers have aspirated [p h t h k h ] and vary between fully voiced [b d g] and plain [p t k]. It is undeniable that HL bilingualism influences the phonetic patterns of WA stops to align more closely to the MajL (Kelly and Keshishian 2021). Based on the three potential contrastive representations for a phonetically overmarked voiced-aspirated distinction outlined in Table 6, different interpretations of the outcomes in the separate contact settings follow.…”