MacLeod, A. A. N., Stoel-Gammon, C., & Wassink, A. B. (2009). Production of high vowels in Canadian English and Canadian French: A comparison of early bilingual and monolingual speakers. Journal of Phonetics, 37, 374–387.
Presentation: Angela
Summary: Hsiao-chien
The purpose of this study was to investigate how bilinguals deal with their two language systems, which was suggested to maintain separate categories instead of merging categories for similar phonemes under an influence between the first and second languages. There were 28 speakers recruited, including 10 early bilingual speakers, 10 monolingual Canadian English speakers, and 8 monolingual Canadian French speakers. The authors adopted 120 monosyllabic real words from English and French that contained the target vowels, /i, ɪ, u, ʊ/, and two low vowels, English / æ/, and French /a/. These words shared either phonetic similarity for place of articulation of the initial consonant, or phonological features because of similar sizes of vowel inventories between Canadian English and Canadian French. In purpose of investigating differences in vowel production across groups between monolinguals and bilinguals, the values of F1 and F2 were measured to capture differences in the aspects of height and advancement.
Results confirmed that early bilinguals were capable of forming separate categories across their languages for similar vowels. First, the significant acoustic differences existed. French monolinguals produced lower F1 values for the lax vowels, and they had more peripheral F2 values than the English monolinguals. The bilinguals significantly produced lower F1 values for their lax vowels in French than in English, and they produced more advanced front vowels and more posterior back vowels in French. These indicated that participants had established language-specific vowel categories for similar vowel pairs through the evaluation of Flege’s Equivalence Classification hypothesis, predicting a category merging for similar vowels. Lastly, no significant differences or post-hoc significances were found between the bilinguals and the monolinguals in each language. It indicated that the bilinguals produced monolingual-like vowels, and the established categories were identical between monolingual speakers and bilingual speakers.
