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Production of coronal stops by simultaneous bilingual adults

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2006

MEGHA SUNDARA
Affiliation:
McGill University
LINDA POLKA
Affiliation:
McGill University
SHARI BAUM
Affiliation:
McGill University

Abstract

This study investigated acoustic-phonetics of coronal stop production by adult simultaneous bilingual and monolingual speakers of Canadian English (CE) and Canadian French (CF). Differences in the phonetics of CF and CE include voicing and place of articulation distinctions. CE has a two-way voicing distinction (in syllable initial position) contrasting short-and long-lag VOT; coronal stops in CE are described as alveolar. CF also has a two-way voicing distinction, but contrasting lead and short-lag VOT; coronal stops in CF are described as dental. Acoustic analyses of stop consonants for both VOT and dental/alveolar place of articulation are reported. Results indicate that simultaneous bilingual as well as monolingual adults produce language-specific differences, albeit not in the same way, across CF and CE for voicing and place. Similarities and differences between simultaneous bilingual and monolingual adults are discussed to address phonological organization in simultaneous bilingual adults.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2006

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Footnotes

This is part of M. Sundara's doctoral thesis. It was supported by an Internal Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant from McGill University to M. Sundara (202686) and a Discovery Grant to L. Polka from Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (RGPIN 105397). We would like to thank Georgina Hernandez for her help with collecting the French samples and Fred Genesee, Susan Guion and two anonymous reviewers for comments on previous versions of this paper.