Language Contact Within the Speaker: Phonetic Variation and Crosslinguistic Influence

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.