Phonetic drift in Spanish-English bilinguals: Experiment and a self-organizing model

Publication date: November 2017 Source:Journal of Phonetics, Volume 65 Author(s): Stephen J. Tobin, Hosung Nam, Carol A. Fowler Studies of speech accommodation provide evidence for change in use of language structures beyond the critical/sensitive period. For example, Sancier and Fowler (1997) found changes in the voice-onset-times (VOTs) of both languages of a Portuguese-English bilingual as a function of her language context. Though accommodation has been studied widely within a monolingual context, it has received less attention in and between the languages of bilinguals. We tested whether these findings of phonetic accommodation, speech accommodation at the phonetic level, would generalize to a sample of Spanish-English bilinguals. We recorded participants reading Spanish and English sentences after 3–4months in the US and after 2–4weeks in a Spanish speaking country and measured the VOTs of their voiceless plosives. Our statistical analyses show that participants’ English VOTs drifted towards those of the ambient language, but their Spanish VOTs did not. We found considerable variation in the extent of individual participants’ drift in English. Further analysis of our results suggested that native-likeness of L2 VOTs and extent of active language use predict the extent of drift. We provide a model based on principles of self-organizing dynamical systems to account for our Spanish-English phonetic drift findings and the Portuguese-English findings.
Source: Journal of Phonetics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research