Increased language co-activation leads to enhanced cross-linguistic phonetic convergence

• Published in: The international journal of bilingualism : cross-disciplinary, cross-linguistic studies of language behavior Vol. 24; no. 2; pp. 208 - 221
• Main Authors: Simonet, Miquel, Amengual, Mark
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01-04-2020; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Acoustic phonetics; Bilingualism; Catalan language; Cognates; Interference (Language); Learning transfer; Linguistic interference; Linguistics; Phonemics; Phonetics; Phonology; Reduction (Phonological or Phonetic); Spanish language; Speech; Speech production; Stress; cross-linguistic influence; Phonetics; unstressed vowel reduction; Catalan; Spanish; bilingual language modes
• ISSN: 1367-0069; 1756-6878
• DOI: 10.1177/1367006919826388

Purpose:
This study investigates the effects of bilingual language modes (or settings) on the speech production patterns of a group of early Catalan/Spanish bilinguals from Majorca, Spain. Our main research question was as follows: are bilingual speech patterns modulated by the level of (co-)activation of a bilingual’s two languages?
Design:
Bilingual participants were classified as a function of their linguistic experience (or dominance), from Catalan- to Spanish-dominant. Subsequently, we recorded their speech in two experimental settings: a unilingual setting in which only Catalan words were uttered, and a bilingual setting in which both Catalan and Spanish words (cognates) were produced in random order.
Data and analysis:
The study examined the acoustic realization of Spanish and Catalan unstressed /a/, which surfaces as [a] in Spanish but is reduced to schwa, [ə], in Catalan. The acoustic characteristics of unstressed /a/ were explored across the two languages and the two experimental settings.
Findings:
Catalan unstressed /a/, which was similarly reduced to schwa in the speech of all participants, became slightly more similar to Spanish unstressed /a/ (i.e., it had a higher first formant) when produced alongside Spanish words (bilingual setting) than when produced in a Catalan unilingual setting. There were no effects of linguistic experience, and the effects of setting did not interact with experience.
Originality:
Very few studies have reported the effects of dynamic cross-linguistic interference in phonetic production, and even fewer have reported them with a phonetic variable resulting from a language-specific phonological process (unstressed vowel reduction) rather than a phonemic contrast.
Implications:
These findings suggest that cross-linguistic interaction is dynamic and modulated by language activation, and that an absence of dominance effects does not necessarily entail an absence of online cross-linguistic phonetic influence.