Are bilinguals different? What VOT tells us about simultaneous bilinguals.

Abstract

The evidence for native-like phonological competence in the two languages spoken by simultaneous bilinguals is investigated by measuring their Voice Onset Time (VOT) of stop consonants in Canadian English (CE) and Canadian French (CF). Past research has suggested a correspondence between age of exposure to the second language and native-like production of VOT. This study addresses two questions: (1) do these simultaneous bilinguals maintain monolingual-like phonological contrasts of the stop consonants? and (2) do these speakers produce monolingual-like variation in the VOT values? Three groups of speakers are compared to investigate these questions: simultaneous bilinguals, monolingual CE, and monolingual CF. The bilingual participants produced monolingual-like phonemic contrasts and phonetic variation for all but the English voiced stops. It is proposed that bilinguals strive to maintain acceptable language-specific distinctions while simultaneously reducing the processing load by producing overlap in some contrasts.