Romance-Germanic Bilingual Phonology; Mehmet Yavas, Margaret Kehoe, Walcir Cardoso

Edited by

Mehmet Yavaş [+–]

Florida International University

Mehmet Yavaş is a Professor of Linguistics at Florida International University.
He has published numerous articles on applied phonology and is the principal
author of Avaliacao Fonologica da Crianca, a phonological assessment procedure
for Brazilian Portuguese. His other publications include Phonological
disorders in children (1991), First and second language phonology (1994),
Phonology: Development and disorders (1998), Unusual productions in phonology
(2014) and Applied English phonology (3rd edition 2015).

Margaret Kehoe [+–]

University of Geneva

Margaret Kehoe is a senior lecturer at the University of Geneva. She is also a practicing speech-language therapist who works with the International community in Geneva. She received her Bachelor in Speech Therapy (with Honors) from the University of Queensland, her MSc, from the University of Arizona, and her Ph.D from the University of Washington. She has conducted research on phonetic and phonological acquisition in English-, German-, Spanish-, and French-speaking children as well as in bilingual children. She is currently interested in the theme of cross-linguistic interaction in bilingual children.

Walcir Cardoso [+–]

Concordia University

Walcir Cardoso is a professor of Applied Linguistics/Teaching English as a Second Language in the Department of Education at Concordia University, Montreal.

Bilingual contact, whereby speakers use two languages in their daily lives, is a very common phenomenon. Among such contacts, Romance-Germanic bilingualism is one of the most widespread. This book investigates several phonetic and phonological issues that are in contrast between four Germanic languages (English, German, Danish and Swedish − more than 500 million speakers) and four Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian − more than 700 million speakers). The chapters cover several well-established phonotactic, segmental and suprasegmental conflicting situations between Germanic and Romance languages: cross-language interaction among young bilinguals as well as adults; the representation and/or instantiation of phonological knowledge in the speech of L2 users; and the sociophonetics of certain segmental and suprasegmental issues in bilinguals.

Based on substantial original empirical research, published here for the first time, this volume represents the most current thinking on the topics covered, and provides essential reading for students, professionals and researchers in the fields of Bilingualism, Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy, Psycholinguistics, Applied Phonetics and Phonology, Romance Linguistics and Germanic Linguistics.

Series: Studies in Phonetics and Phonology

Preliminaries

Acknowledgments vii

Mehmet Yavaş FREE

Florida International University

Introduction [+–] 1-13

Mehmet Yavaş,Margaret Kehoe,Walcir Cardoso £17.50

Florida International University

University of Geneva

Concordia University

Walcir Cardoso is a professor of Applied Linguistics/Teaching English as a Second Language in the Department of Education at Concordia University, Montreal.

This chapter provides an overview of the book’s scope and contents and provides a rationale for the collection as a whole. Bilingual contact whereby speakers use their two languages in their daily lives is a very common phenomenon. Among such situations, Romance-Germanic bilingualism is one of the most widespread contacts. The chapters in this book investigate several phonetic and phonological issues that are in contrast between 4 Germanic languages (English, German, Danish, and Swedish- with more than 500 million speakers) and 4 Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian – with more than 700 million speakers). Contributions from original empirical research cover several phonotactic, segmental, and suprasegmental conflicting situations between Germanic and Romance languages. The first four chapters investigate issues related to vowels through Spanish-English, French-Danish, Spanish-German, and Spanish-Danish contact situations. The following five chapters explore various topics related to consonantal conflicts. These involve laterals in Spanish-English, final stops, and sonorant codas in Portuguese-English bilingualism. The volume next examines the issues related to voice onset time in French-Swedish, and Italian-German contacts, suprasegmental issues in French-English contact in France and in Canada and a phonotactic inquiry focusing on the markedness of onsets in Portuguese-English contact. The volume concludes with a look into sociophonetics of voice onset time, intonation and labial fricatives in Spanish-English bilinguals.

Vowel Reduction in German-Spanish Bilinguals [+–] 14-37

Margaret Kehoe,Conxita Lleó £17.50

University of Geneva

University of Hamburg (Retired)

Conxita Lleó, now retired, was Professor of Romance Linguistics at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She studied Romance Languages at the University of Barcelona and General Linguistics at the U of W (Seattle), and received two PhD degrees, one from each university. She taught at the Universities of Barcelona, Concepción (Chile), San Luis (Argentina), Göttingen (Germany) the University of Hamburg . Her focus of research lies in bilingualism, child language, phonological acquisition, and sound change, where she has published about 100 studies and several books. During ca. 20 years she obtained research grants from the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). She fluently speaks Spanish, Catalan, French, English, and German.

Vowel reduction maximizes the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables. In stress-timed languages, vowels of unstressed syllables are reduced, but not in syllable-timed languages. In this study, we examine the development of unstressed syllables in German (stress-timed) and Spanish (syllable-timed). The empirical data-base consists of the productions of three bilingual German-Spanish children recorded longitudinally, who are then compared to three monolingual German and Spanish children. Vowel quality and duration of unstressed syllables were measured in two- to four-syllable words extracted from the data-base at ages 2;6 through to 3;0 years. Results indicated that bilingual children were mildly disadvantaged in the acquisition of reduced syllables in German as compared to monolingual children, although not in word-final position, and that they produced non-reduced syllables in Spanish in a similar way to their monolingual counterparts. Thus, there was some delay and transfer from the language with simple syllables to the language with complex ones.

Cross-Language Influence in the Productions of French-English Bilingual Children: Separation or Interaction? [+–] 38-55

Christelle Dodane,Ranka Bijeljac-Babic £17.50

Université Paul Valéry

Christelle Dodane is a lecturer at the Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier,
France.

University of Poitiers & Paris Descartes University

Ranka Bijeljac-Babic is a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Poitiers and assistant professor and researcher in the ‘Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception’ at the Paris Descartes Univeristy, France.

Bilingual contact whereby speakers use their two languages in their daily lives is a very common phenomenon. Among such situations, Romance-Germanic bilingualism is one of the most widespread contacts. The chapters in this book investigate several phonetic and phonological issues that are in contrast between 4 Germanic languages (English, German, Danish, and Swedish- with more than 500 million speakers) and 4 Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian – with more than 700 million speakers). Contributions from original empirical research cover several phonotactic, segmental, and suprasegmental conflicting situations between Germanic and Romance languages. The first four chapters investigate issues related to vowels through Spanish-English, French-Danish, Spanish-German, and Spanish-Danish contact situations. The following five chapters explore various topics related to consonantal conflicts. These involve laterals in Spanish-English, final stops, and sonorant codas in Portuguese-English bilingualism. The volume next examines the issues related to voice onset time in French-Swedish, and Italian-German contacts, suprasegmental issues in French-English contact in France and in Canada and a phonotactic inquiry focusing on the markedness of onsets in Portuguese-English contact. The volume concludes with a look into sociophonetics of voice onset time, intonation and labial fricatives in Spanish-English bilinguals.

The Initial Development of Voice Onset Time in Early Successive French-Swedish Bilinguals [+–] 56-78

Frida Splendido £17.50

Lund University

Frida Splendido works as a senior lecturer of French and Swedish as a second language at the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University. She is also a pedagogical developer at the Lund University Humanities Lab. Her research interests include phonological development, bilingual phonology, phonetics and second language acquisition.

This chapter explores the initial development of VOT in three Swedish-speaking learners of French (age of onset: 3;0-3;5). Swedish uses long lag and short lag/lead to differentiate voiceless and voiced stops word-initially (Helgasson & Ringen 2008; Sundberg & Lacerda 1999). In French this distinction is made using short lag and lead (Kessinger och Blumstein 1997). Through a memory game word-initial stops were elicited in three vocalic contexts. French and Swedish productions from three recordings were analysed (at 10, 19 and 29 months of exposure). Data was also collected from age-matched simultaneous bilinguals (n = 3) and French-speaking monolinguals (n = 2). The successive bilinguals separate the two languages in the first recording. Initial French productions appear influenced by Swedish VOT but later align with the data from the monolinguals and simultaneous bilinguals. The successive bilinguals’ Swedish VOT indicates a delay compared to monolingual development as reported in the literature. This was also the case for the simultaneous bilinguals. Results are discussed with regards to factors such as bilingual frequency and markedness (see Lleó & Cortés 2013). Helgasson, P., & C. Ringen. 2008. ”Voicing and aspiration in Swedish stops.” Journal of Phonetics, 36: 607–28. Kessinger, R. H., & S. E. Blumstein. 1997. ”Effects of speaking rate on voice-onset time in Thai, French, and English.” Journal of Phonetics, 25: 143–68. Lleó, C., & S. Cortés. 2013. ”Modeling the outcome of language contact in the speech of German-Spanish and Catalan-Spanish bilingual children”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2013 (221): 101–25. Sundberg, U., & F. Lacerda. 1999. ”Voice onset time in speech to infants and adults.” Phonetica, 56: 186–99.

Voice Onset Time in German-Italian Simultaneous Bilinguals: Evidence on Cross-Language Influence and Markedness [+–] 79-98

Tanja Kupisch,Conxita Lleó £17.50

University of Konstanz & Arctic University of Norway

Tanja Kupisch is Professor of Romance Linguistics in the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and Professor II at the Arctic University of Norway.

University of Hamburg (Retired)

This study aims to investigate whether the language spoken in the childhood environment has some effect on the development and maintenance of the phonetic systems of simultaneous bilinguals. More specifically, we analyze the Voice Onset Time (VOT) of semi-spontaneous productions of the voiceless stop /k/ by 14 German-Italian bilinguals, who grew up in either Germany or Italy. Results indicate that most speakers have distinct VOT ranges in their two languages, which are within those of monolinguals, i.e. short lag in Italian and long lag in German. This even holds for their minority language, in spite of the fact that it is spoken with a perceivable foreign accent.

Production in English Laterals by Early Sequential Spanish-English Bilinguals [+–] 99-120

Mehmet Yavaş £17.50

Florida International University

This chapter examines the patterns of acquisition of the English laterals by early sequential Spanish-English bilinguals. Spanish /l/ is always ‘clear’, while Am. English /l/ shows degrees of ‘dark’, depending on the context. (Quilis et. al, 1979; Carter & Local, 2007). 30 participants, with average age of English acquisition 4:6 are included in the study. Productuions are acoustically analyzed. Research questions include 1) Are productions of early sequential bilinguals different from those of monolinguals with respect to English laterals? 2) If so, are there contextual factors? and 3) Does age of leaning explain the different performances of individual subjects? Results support Flege’s (1995) ‘equivalence classification, and Major’s (2001) “Similarity Differential Hypothesis’ in that dissimilar phenomena are acquired at faster rates than similar phenomena.

Production and Perception of Danish Front Rounded /y/: A Comparison of Ultimate Attainment in Native Spanish and Native English Speakers [+–] 121-136

Ocke-Schwen Bohn,Camila Linn Garibaldi £17.50

Arhus University

Ocke-Schwen Bohn received his PhD from Kiel University (Germany) and spent his time as a post-doc working with James Flege at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Professor of English Linguistics at Arhus University since 1996. His main research interests are infant, cross-language, and second language speech perception, and foreign accented speech.

Aarhus University

Camila Linn Garibaldi is a graduate student at Aarhus University.

Front rounded vowels are part of the inventory of most Germanic languages, but are typically absent in Romance languages. We report a study which examined native Spanish speakers’ ultimate attainment with regards to the perception and production of Danish /y/. Acoustic comparisons of natively produced Spanish /i, u/ and Danish /i, y, u/, as well as the perceptual assimilation of Danish /i, u, y/ to Spanish /i, u/ were used to generate predictions of the perception and production accuracy of Danish /y/ by highly experienced native Spanish speakers based on Flege’s (1995) Speech Leaning Model (SLM) and Best & Tyler’s (2007) Perceptual Assimilation Model as applied to L2 learning (PAM-L2). Our results confirm the predictions of both models: Highly experienced native Spanish speakers discriminate Danish /i y/ and /y, u/ near ceiling, and they produce a Danish-like /y/, providing further evidence of adults’ intact speech learning abilities.

Interactions between Native and Non-Native Vowels in French-Danish Contact: Production Training Study [+–] 137-156

Natalia Kartushina £17.50

Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language

Natalia Kartushina is a postdoctoral researcher at the Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain.

Speakers who acquire a foreign language (L2) in adulthood (and even earlier), often experience major difficulties in producing non-native speech sounds, a phenomenon commonly known as having a foreign accent. These difficulties in non-native phonetic production are attributed to difficulties in distinguishing similar to native non-native sounds. Consequently, native sounds are used to produce similar non-native phones. Production training techniques whereby speakers receive feedback that compares their productions to that of native speakers’ have been shown to remediate these accents, even though there is important variability across speakers in their sensitivity to training. In this study, monolingual French speakers were trained to produce the Danish /o/ vowel that is similar to the French /o/. It explores, first, the individual-specific properties of French productions in relation to L2 production before and during training. Second, it examines the effects of training with Danish /o/ on the production of similar French /o/ vowel.

Environmental Markedness in Portuguese-English Contact [+–] 157-180

Robert Carlisle £17.50

California State University, Bakersfield

Robert S. Carlisle ([email protected]) received his doctoral degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana. He has published in Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition amd is Professor in the Department of English at the California State University, Bakers eld.

Research with Spanish speakers learning English over the last 25 years has consistently found that Spanish speakers modify less marked onsets significantly less frequently than more marked onsets; that more marked onsets do not reach a criterion level of acquisition before more marked onsets; that phonological environment has a significant effect on the frequency of prothesis; and that the results generally support Major’s (2001) Ontogeny Phylogeny Model (OPM). Much less research has been conducted with Portuguese speakers learning English, and the results have been less consistent. The purpose of the current research is to examine the production of onsets in a markedness relationship by native speakers of Portuguese.

Medial Coda and Final Stops in Brazilian Portuguese-English Contact [+–] 181-199

Paul John,Walcir Cardoso £17.50

Université du Québec à Montréal

Paul John is a professor of linguistics and ESL teacher trainer in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières (Canada). He conducts research on first and second language phonology, with a particular interest in the acquisition of novel segments and syllable structure in an L2 and in the phenomenon of hypercorrection

Concordia University

Walcir Cardoso is a professor of Applied Linguistics/Teaching English as a Second Language in the Department of Education at Concordia University, Montreal.

Our research investigates [i]-epenthesis after medial coda and word-final [p] and [k] by Brazilian-Portuguese ESL learners in Montreal (e.g., doctor [dɑkitər] or magic [mægiki]). When learners eventually overcome [i]-epenthesis, clearly they learn to syllabify medial [p] and [k] in chapter and doctor as codas. Two competing analyses, however, have been proposed for the syllabification of final [p k]: these are either i) codas or ii) onsets of empty nuclei. Under the first analysis, learners should acquire medial coda and final stops together, since these share a prosodic representation. We found, however, that medial coda stops were acquired well before final stops, a finding that provides important confirmation of the view that final stops are onsets of empty nuclei rather than codas.

Acquisition of English Stress by Québec Francophones [+–] 200-221

Guilherme Duarte Garcia,Natália Brambatti Guzzo £17.50

McGill University

Guilherme Duarte Garcia is a fourth-year PhD student at McGill University,
Montreal.

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Natália Brambatti Guzzo has a PhD in Linguistics from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

This chapter examines how Québec French (QF) speakers acquire phrase and word prominence in English. Unlike European French, where stress is phrase-final (Fouché 1934, Garde 1968), QF has been shown to have non-final (penult) as well as phrase-final prominence (Paradis & Deshaies 1990, Thibault & Ouellet 1996). English stress, on the other hand, relies on both morphological and phonological factors, with extrametricality and syllable weight playing a role in stress assignment. QF speakers acquiring English therefore need to learn that (a) final stress in English is avoided and (b) stress is often three syllables away from the right edge of the word (e.g., fórtunate) if the penult syllable is light; when a level-2 suffix is involved, stress may be four syllables away from the right edge of the word (e.g., fórtunately). In our production experiment, we analyze how QF speakers (L2ers) produce (i) phrases in isolation, and (ii) phrases in carrier sentences. Our prediction is that words with antepenult or pre-antepenult stress should present more variation, given the bigger deviance from the L1 pattern. As a result, post-tonic lapses in the target language may be resolved with secondary prominences.

Factors Affecting L2 Learning across the Lifespan: Spanish Learners of English [+–] 222-243

Wendy Baker-Smemoe £17.50

Brigham Young University

Wendy Baker-Smemoe is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Brigham Young University. Her research interests include second language acquisition, speech perception and production and dialectology.

The Speech Learning Model (SLM) (1995; 2003) predicts that learners acquire accurate second language (L2) speech perception and production throughout their lifetime, but that factors like degree of first language (L1) and L2 interaction change with age of acquisition (AOA) and affect learners’ success. The current study tests which and how factors affect L2 learning across the lifespan by examining the relative importance of several factors on L2 speech learning. Seventy-six Spanish speakers who immigrated to the US at different ages (0-69) participated. The learners’ English global foreign accent and English vowel perception were compared to their scores on tasks of ability to imitate, working memory capacity, and phonological memory (cognitive factors), their attitudes towards L1 and L2 language/culture (social factors), and their age, experience, and L2 use (individual factors). Results demonstrate different factors were important for different AOAs and suggest some changes to the predictions of the SLM. Flege, J.E. (1995).Second language speech learning: theory, findings, and problems. In W.Strange (Ed.), Speech perception and linguistic experience: issues in cross language research (pp. 233–277). Timonium, MD: York Press. Flege, J.E. (2003). Assessing constraints on second-language segmental production and perception. In A. Meyer & N. Schiller (Eds.), Phonetics and phonology in language comprehension and production (pp. 319–355). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

English Sonorant Codas in a Brazilian Portuguese-English Bilingual Context [+–] 244-262

Rosane Silveira,Alison Roberto Gonçalves £17.50

Federal University of Santa Catarina

Rosane Silveira is a faculty member of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the Federal University of Santa Catarina – Brazil. She conducts and supervises research on English-Portuguese interphonology. She was a visiting scholar at Columbia University (Teachers College) and at Concordia University (Education Department).

University of Santa Catarina

Alison Roberto Gonçalves is a PhD student at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil.

This paper investigates the production of English codas by Brazilians who arrived in the United States as adults and spent over five years in the country. The focus is (1) to examine the types of L1 phonological processes found in the L2 production of English nasals (/m/ and /n/) and the liquid /l/ in coda position, and (2) to investigate the internal and external factors that motivated the variation observed. Due to L1 transfer and grapheme-to-phoneme rules, these target segments may undergo a variety of phonological processes such as (1) nasal deletion and the subsequent nasalization of the preceding vowel (e.g., sun à [sã]) and (2) l-gliding (e.g., sail à [sejw]). The data consist of 30 CVC words distributed among three following phonological environments: a pause, a vowel, and a consonant. Thirty-one participants were asked to read aloud these words, embedded in “meaningful” carrier sentences. To investigate the effects of orthography, 50% of the words in the reading task ended in a consonant grapheme (e.g., ‘sun’) and the remaining words ended in a vowel grapheme (e.g., ‘pine’). The data analysis includes a discussion of the internal (following phonological environment, orthography) and external variables (speakers’ background variables such as L2 proficiency, formal education, age and reported L2 use) that affect the productions of the target consonants. The paper also discusses how the acquisition of a second language differs from that of a foreign language.

The Sociophonetics of Spanish–English Contact in the United States [+–] 263-282

Barbara E. Bullock,Daniel J. Olson £17.50

University of Texas at Austin

Barbara E. Bullock is a Professor at the University of Texas. She specializes in the linguistic effects of bilingualism and language contact. Her interests lie primarily in exploring the Romance language diaspora in the Americas.

Purdue University

Daniel J. Olson is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Purdue University. His research interests include experimental approaches to bilingual phonetics, in both early and late bilinguals, the storage and acquisition of distinct phonetic inventories, and code-switching.

The current work provides evidence for the impact of several factors, speaker-internal and speaker-external, that have been shown to impact bilingual phonetic production. We focus on several points of phonetic divergence between the sounds systems––VOT, intonation, and labial fricative production––for empirical illustrations of how internal and external variables interact among Spanish-English bilinguals in the U.S. The variables are of three types: (1) we consider how language dominance and age of acquisition impact phonetic production; (2) we demonstrate how language mode modulates phonetic production such that the same speaker may produce varying realizations of a phonetic feature in differing language contexts, and (3) we show how other socio-contextual factors, including language of education, literacy, and speakers’ social networks impact a speaker’s performance of bilingual speech.

End Matter

Index 283-286

Mehmet Yavaş FREE

Florida International University

Reviews

The editors are very well-known and respected in the field. A wonderful collection.
John Archibald, Professor of Linguistics, University of Victoria, British Columbia

An impressive collection of papers that promises to move the field of bilingual phonological development forward.
Ferenc Bunta, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Houston

Researchers in the fields of second language acquisition, phonetics, phonology, prosody, psycholinguistics and didactics will benefit from reading this book. The range of topics addressed in the volume is rich. The wide range of experimental methods used in the studies is an asset. There is no doubt this book is an important contribution to the research on bilingualism and the acquisition of L2 phonology.
Language, Interaction and Acquisition

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Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Romance-Germanic Bilingual Phonology

Mehmet Yavaş [+–]

Florida International University

Margaret Kehoe [+–]

University of Geneva

Walcir Cardoso [+–]

Concordia University

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