Article published in:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 10:6 (2020) ► pp. 847–872

Language dominance does not always predict cross-linguistic interactions in bilingual speech production

| University of California Santa Cruz
| University of Arizona
The present study describes the results of two experiments that analyze the effects of language dominance on Catalan/Spanish bilingual speech production. We examined the acoustics of the Catalan [a]~[ə] alternation (a phonological process induced by lexical stress) and of the Catalan mid vowel contrasts /e/-/ɛ/ and /o/-/ɔ/ (two phonemic contrasts) in the speech of Catalan- vs. Spanish-dominant early Catalan/Spanish bilinguals from Majorca (Spain). The results indicate that, contrary to the analysis of the Catalan mid vowels, stressed and unstressed Spanish and Catalan /a/ yielded no significant difference as a function of language dominance. These findings suggest that unstressed vowel reduction, a phonological process, may be relatively easier to acquire than phonemic contrasts with a low functional load (/e/-/ɛ/, /o/-/ɔ/), perhaps because its predictability and high frequency may attract attention and/or relieve cognitive resources, which could be conducive to phonological learning. These findings demonstrate that language dominance effects in the production of phonemic contrasts, widely researched in the literature on early bilingualism, do not guarantee the same effects on the implementation of phonological processes.
Keywords: unstressed vowel reduction, phonological processes, phonemic contrasts, language dominance, bilingual speech production
Published online: 16 July 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.18042.ame
References

References

Amengual, M.
(2012) Interlingual influence in bilingual speech: Cognate status effect in a continuum of bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 517–530. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2016a) Cross-linguistic influence in the bilingual mental lexicon: Evidence of cognate effects in the phonetic production and processing of a vowel contrast. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 617. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2016b) The perception and production of language-specific mid-vowel contrasts: Shifting the focus to the bilingual individual in early language input conditions. International Journal of Bilingualism, 20, 133–152. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2016c) The perception of language-specific phonetic categories does not guarantee accurate phonological representations in the lexicon of early bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 37, 1221–1251. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2018) Asymmetrical interlingual influence in the production of Spanish and English laterals as a result of competing activation in bilingual language processing. Journal of Phonetics, 69, 12–28. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Amengual, M., & Chamorro, P.
(2015) The effects of language dominance in the perception and production of the Galician mid vowel contrasts. Phonetica, 72, 207–236. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Best, C. T., & Tyler, M. D.
(2007) Nonnative and second-language speech perception: Commonalities and complementarities. In O.-S. Bohn & M. Munro (Eds.), Language experience in second language speech learning: In honor of James Emil Flege (pp. 13–34). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Birdsong, D.
(2014) Dominance and age in bilingualism. Applied Linguistics, 35, 374–392. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Birdsong, D., Gertken, L. M., & Amengual, M.
(2012) Bilingual language profile: An easy-to-use instrument to assess bilingualism. COERLL, University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Boersma, P.
(2001) Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International, 5, 341–345.Google Scholar
Cromdal, J.
(1999) Childhood bilingualism and metalinguistic skills: Analysis and control in young Swedish-English bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 1–20. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cumming, G.
(2014) The new statistics: Why and how. Psychological Science, 25, 7–29. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dmitrieva, O., Jongman, A., & Sereno, J.
(2010) Phonological neutralization by native and non-native speakers: The case of Russian final devoicing. Journal of Phonetics, 38, 483–492. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dunn, A. L., & Fox Tree, J. E.
(2009) A quick, gradient Bilingual Dominance Scale. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12, 273–289. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Escudero, P.
(2005) Linguistic perception and second language acquisition: Explaining the attainment of optimal phonological categorization. Utrecht University the Netherlands.Google Scholar
Escudero, P., & Vasiliev, P.
(2011) Cross-language acoustic similarity predicts perceptual assimilation of Canadian English and Canadian French vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 130, EL277–EL283. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
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. 229–273). Timonium, Maryland: York Press.Google Scholar
Flege, J. E., & Bohn, O.-S.
(1989) An instrumental study of vowel reduction and stress placement in Spanish-accented English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 11, 35–62. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Flege, J. E., MacKay, I. R. A., & Piske, T.
(2002) Assessing bilingual dominance. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23, 567–598. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Flege, J. E., Schirru, C., & Mackay, I. R.
(2003) Interaction between the native and second language phonetic subsystems. Speech Communication, 40(4), 467–491. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fourakis, M.
(1991) Tempo, stress, and vowel reduction in American English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 90, 1816–1827. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gollan, T. H., Weissberger, G. H., Runnqvist, E., Montoya, R. I., & Cera, C. M.
(2012) Self-ratings of spoken language dominance: A multilingual Naming Test (MINT) and preliminary norms for young and aging Spanish-English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 594–615. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, F.
(1989) Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person. Brain and Language, 36, 3–15. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hazan, V., & Boulakia, G.
(1993) Perception and production of a voicing contrast by French-English bilinguals. Language and Speech, 36, 17–38. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Herrick, D.
(2003) An acoustic analysis of phonological vowel reduction in six varieties of Catalan. University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Jarvis, S., & Pavlenko, A.
(2008) Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. New York: Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kharlamov, V.
(2014) Incomplete neutralization of the voicing contrast in word-final obstruents in Russian: Phonological, lexical, and methodological influences. Journal of Phonetics, 43, 47–56. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kupisch, T., Lein, T., Barton, D., Schröder, D. J., Stangen, I., & Stoehr, A.
(2014) Acquisition outcomes across domains in adult simultaneous bilinguals with French as weaker and stronger language. Journal of French Language Studies, 24(3), 347–376. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lakens, D.
(2013) Calculating and reporting effect sizes to facilitate cumulative science: A practical primer for t-tests and ANOVAs. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, Article 863. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lawrence, M. A.
(2016) Easy analysis and visualization of factorial experiments (Version 4.4-0). Retrieved from https://​github​.com​/mike​-lawrence​/ez
Lee, B., Guion, S. G., & Harada, T.
(2006) Acoustic analysis of the production of unstressed English vowels by early and late Korean and Japanese bilinguals. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 487–513. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lim, V. P. C., Rickard Liow, S. J., Lincoln, M., Chan, Y. K., & Onslow, M.
(2008) Determining language dominance in English-Mandarin bilinguals: Development of a self-report classification tool for clinical use. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 389–412. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lleó, C., Cortés, S., & Benet, A.
(2008) Contact-induced phonological changes in the Catalan spoken in Barcelona. In P. Siemund & N. Kintana (Eds.), Language contact and contact languages (Vol. 7, pp. 185–212). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Llompart, M., & Simonet, M.
(2017) Unstressed vowel reduction across Majorcan Catalan dialects: Production and spoken word recognition. Language and Speech, 1–37.Google Scholar
Marian, V., Blumenfeld, H., & Kaushanskaya, M.
(2007) The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q): Assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50(4), 940–967. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Miller, J.
(1981) Effects of speaking rate on segmental distinctions. In P. Eimas & J. Miller (Eds.), Perspectives on the study of speech (pp. 39–74). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Nadeu, M., & Renwick, M. E. L.
(2016) Variation in the lexical distribution and implementation of phonetically similar phonemes in Catalan. Journal of Phonetics, 58, 22–47. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Padgett, J., & Tabain, M.
(2005) Adaptive dispersion theory and phonological vowel reduction in Russian. Phonetica, 62, 14–54. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Piske, T., MacKay, I. R. A., & Flege, J. E.
(2001) Factors affecting degree of foreign accent in an L2: A review. Journal of Phonetics, 29, 191–215. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
R Development Core Team
(2016) R: A language and environment for statistical computing (Version 3.4.2). Vienna, Austria. Retrieved from http://​www​.R​-project​.org/
Ramírez, M., & Simonet, M.
(2018) Language dominance and the perception of the Majorcan Catalan /ʎ/–/ʒ/ contrast: Asymmetrical phonological representations. International Journal of Bilingualism, 22(6), 638–652. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Renwick, M. E. L., & Ladd, D. R.
(2016) Phonetic distinctiveness vs. lexical contrastiveness in non-robust phonemic contrasts. Laboratory Phonology, 7, 1–19. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Renwick, M. E. L., & Nadeu, M.
(2018) A survey of phonological mid-vowel intuitions in Central Catalan. Language & Speech, 1–41. Crossref. Published online by SAGE journals, January 9 2018Google Scholar
Roettger, T. B., Winter, B., Grawunder, S., Kirby, J., & Grice, M.
(2014) Assessing incomplete neutralization of final devoicing in German. Journal of Phonetics, 43, 11–25. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sebastián-Gallés, N., Echeverría, S., & Bosch, L.
(2005) The influence of initial exposure on lexical representation: Comparing early and simultaneous bilinguals. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 240–255. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Simonet, M.
(2010a) Alveolar laterals in Majorcan Spanish: Effects of contact with Catalan? In S. Colina, A. Olarrea, & A. M. Carvalho (Eds.), Romance Linguistics 2009 (pp. 81–94). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2010b) Dark and clear laterals in Catalan and Spanish: Interaction of phonetic categories in early bilinguals. Journal of Phonetics, 38, 663–678. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2011a) Intonational convergence in language contact: Utterance-final F0 contours in Catalan-Spanish early bilinguals. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 41, 157–184. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2011b) Production of a Catalan-specific vowel contrast by early Catalan/Spanish bilinguals. Phonetica, 68, 88–110. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2014) Phonetic consequences of dynamic cross-linguistic interference in proficient bilinguals. Journal of Phonetics, 43, 26–37. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2016) The phonetics and phonology of bilingualism. In Oxford Handbooks Online: Scholarly Research Reviews (pp. 1–25). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Smith, B. L., Hayes-Harb, R., Bruss, M., & Harker, A.
(2009) Production and perception of voicing and devoicing in similar German and English word pairs by native speakers of German. Journal of Phonetics, 37, 257–275. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Stevens, S. S., Volkmann, J., & Newman, E. B.
(1937) A scale for the measurement of the psychological magnitude pitch. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 8, 185–190. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Talamas, A., Kroll, J., & Dufour, R.
(1999) From form to meaning: Stages in the acquisition of second-language vocabulary. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2, 45–58. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tamamaki, K.
(1993) Language dominance in bilinguals’ arithmetic operations according to their language use. Language Learning, 43, 239–261. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tomé Lourido, G., & Evans, B. G.
(2019) The effects of language dominance switch in bilinguals: Galician new speakers’ speech production and perception. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 22(3), 637–654. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Torchiano, M.
(2017) Effsize: A collection of functions to compute the standardized effects sizes for experiments (Version 0.7.1). Retrieved from https://​github​.com​/mtorchiano​/effsize/
Wheeler, M.
(2005) The Phonology of Catalan. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Black, Martha, Marc F. Joanisse & Yasaman Rafat
2020. Language Dominance Modulates the Perception of Spanish Approximants in Late Bilinguals. Languages 5:1 ► pp. 7 ff. Crossref logo
de la Fuente Iglesias, Monica & Susana Pérez Castillejo
2020. L1 Phonetic permeability and phonetic path towards a potential merger. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 06 december 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.