Abstract:
The present study investigated the effects of linguistic experience on the production of voice onset time (VOT) in syllable-initial stop consonants. Spanish and English realize the voicing distinction using different phonetic categories. Of interest in this study was how language background influenced VOT across different speaking rates. Three groups of subjects (English and Spanish monolinguals and Spanish--English bilinguals), produced sentences containing voiced and voiceless stops at different speaking rates. Care was taken to place the bilinguals into Spanish and English monolingual modes on separate occasions. Preliminary analyses of the bilinguals' data suggest several findings. Comparing the VOT values for bilinguals' /p/ tokens in both language modes provided evidence for separate phonetic categories. Changes in speaking rate affected the VOT values for the voiceless tokens when in English mode and the voiced tokens when in Spanish mode. Finally, differences were found among the talkers in the way in which they realized the voicing distinction in Spanish, but not in English mode. These results point to differential effects of speaking rate on phoneme categories as a function of language mode. Additional analyses will be presented comparing productions by Spanish and English monolinguals to Spanish--English bilinguals' in their corresponding language modes. [Work supported by NSF.]