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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 20, 2025

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Published on: September 27, 2024

Language Contact Within the Speaker: Phonetic Variation and Crosslinguistic Influence.

Khia A Johnson¹, Molly Babel¹

¹Department of Linguistics, The University of British Columbia, Canada.

Language and Speech

|July 31, 2023

Summary

In bilingual speech, the less variable language influences the more variable one. This study shows how phonetic variation in Cantonese affects English, impacting sound change.

Keywords:

Speech production bilingualism crosslinguistic influence pronunciation variation spontaneous speech corpus

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Area of Science:

Phonetics and Phonology
Bilingualism Studies
Sociolinguistics

Background:

Sound change models suggest variation distribution within speech communities influences change direction.
Bilingual speech offers a unique context to test how language interaction shapes phonetic variation.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if the less variable language constrains phonetic variation in the more variable language within bilingual speakers.
To explore the impact of Cantonese phonetic distributions on English sound production in early Cantonese-English bilinguals.

Main Methods:

Analysis of spontaneous speech corpora from early Cantonese-English bilinguals.
Comparison with monolingual English control corpora to identify cross-language influence.
Focus on phonetic features of stop obstruents, specifically voicing and release patterns.

Main Results:

Cantonese-English bilinguals produced intervocalic English /b d g/ with less voicing and word-final English /t k/ with less release compared to monolingual English speakers.
These patterns align with the phonetic distributions observed in Cantonese, where initial voicing is gradient but final stop release is prohibited.
Language mode (which language was active) did not significantly impact these observed phonetic patterns in bilinguals.

Conclusions:

Phonetic variation in cross-linguistically linked categories in bilingual speech is shaped by the phonetic variation distributions within each language.
This provides a mechanistic explanation for differential susceptibility to cross-language phonetic influence.
The findings support models of sound change driven by variation distribution, extended to the bilingual context.