Stop consonant production of French immersion students in Western Canada: A study of voice onset time

Abstract

Objectives/research questions:

The present study investigates the development of French stop consonants among English-speaking children who are enrolled in an early French immersion program in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Our goal is to observe the stop consonant production pattern, and to determine whether interactions between the two language systems occur, while examining student progression with increasing experience.

Methodology:

Fifty-six students in grades 1, 3, and 5 participated in a speech production task administered in both English and French. For each language, they were asked to repeat a total of 54 words beginning with one of the six stop consonants, /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, and /g/. In addition, 45 age-matched monolingual English-speaking children were tested to serve as a control group.

Data and analysis:

Voice onset time (VOT) was the acoustic measure analyzed for each language and for children of each grade. An analysis of variance was conducted for language- and experience-related effects.

Conclusions:

For the French voiceless stops, French immersion students display non-native-like VOT values in the intermediate range between monolingual English voiced and voiceless stops. Their English voiceless stops exhibit higher VOT values than the monolinguals’ and are separate from those of their French. For voiced stops, their English and French are indistinguishable, located within the range of voiced stops for monolingual English speakers.

Originality:

Previous research on French–English bilingualism has generally been limited to adults. Furthermore, examination of French immersion students has rarely focused on their phonetic development, and acoustic analysis of this population is virtually non-existent.

Implications:

Our results highlight the importance of input, as well as social, and educational context in second language learning.

Keywords

French-English bilingualism French immersion stop production voice onset time cross-language influence

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