2009/04/16

Sundara, M., Polka, L,. & Baum, S. (2006). Production of coronal stops by simultaneous bilingual adults. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 9(1), 97–114.

Presentation: Angela

Summary: Chris

This study investigated the acoustic properties of coronal stops for simultaneous English-French bilinguals in Canada. Monolinguals of Canadian-English (CE) and monolinguals of Canadian-French (CF) were also recruited in the experiments. Target words beginning with /t/ or /d/ were embedded into carrier sentences and were read aloud by subjects. For each target coronal stop, the acoustic data including VOT, relative burst intensity, mean burst frequency, SD of burst frequency, skewness of burst frequency, and Kurtosis of burst frequency were further analyzed. It was found that monolingual speakers presented language-specific differences in VOT, relative intensity, mean SD, and kurtosis of burst frequency. For bilinguals, results also showed that Canadian English-French simultaneous bilinguals presented language-specific differences in their two native languages in their VOT and their SD of burst frequency. Moreover, in CE, the /d/-/t/ contrasts in VOT, relative intensity, and mean burst frequency were significant; however, in CF, the acoustic contrast between /d/ and /t/ was only significant in VOT. Furthermore, the VOT data showed that bilinguals did not produce CE and CF with VOT in-between the values produced by monolingual speakers. The findings indicated that simultaneous bilinguals and monolinguals might focus on different phonetic properties to organize and implement the phonological contrasts in their two native languages.