Fowler, C. A., Sramko, V., Ostry, D. J., Rowland, S. A., & Halle, P. (2008). Cross language phonetic influences on the speech of French-English bilinguals. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 649–663.
Studies on L2 learning have shown that depending on the ambient environment, learners’ proficiency, and age of learning, L2 learners show large discrepancy on how they organize the languages they know. In this study, the authors compared the performance of French-English simultaneous bilinguals, French as L1 early French-English bilinguals, English as L1 early French-English bilinguals, and two groups of monolinguals whose L1 was English and French, respectively, to see if the lengths of their VOTs for French and English stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ were significantly different. Subjects were asked to read English and French sentences containing the targeted stops and the VOTs of these stops were measured. Compatible with previous research, results showed that monolingual French speakers had shorter VOTs compared with English monolinguals. Interestingly, when comparing monolinguals with bilinguals, the length difference between French and English VOT was not as large. When comparing all the groups, it was shown that French monolinguals had shorter VOT compared with French as L1 early French-English bilinguals, with French-English simultaneous bilinguals being longer, and English as L1 early French-English bilinguals being the longest. The results indicated that while bilinguals differentiate between their two languages systems in terms of VOT, the degree of differentiation may not be equivalent to monolinguals and may also differ in terms of the degree of bilingualism.
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