Abstract:

This study investigated the effect of the linguistic experience on the duration of the preceding closure interval (CI) on word--initial-stop consonants. Native speakers of English (NE), Spanish (NS), and Spanish--English bilinguals produced sentences containing words beginning with either a voiced or a voiceless stop consonant. As is typical for word--initial stops in English, no difference in the CI occurred between voiced and voiceless consonants for the NE speakers. The NS speakers produced the voiceless stops with CIs similar to the NE voiced stops (consistent with the fact that both are classified phonetically as short-lag stops). The voiced stops, however, had significantly shorter CIs. Like the NE speakers, the bilinguals in the English mode produced voiced and voiceless stops with equal CIs. In the Spanish mode, the bilinguals maintained a distinction in CI between voiced and voiceless stops, although the CIs were significantly different from their NS counterparts. The results suggest that Spanish speakers use CI to help distinguish the voicing characteristics of stops in word--initial position and that bilinguals reweigh different voicing cues as a function of the language mode.