Journal Article

Interlingual influence in bilingual speech: Cognate status effect in a continuum of bilingualism

AMENGUAL, MARK

2012

Overview

The present study investigates voice onset times (VOTs) to determine if cognates enhance the cross-language phonetic influences in the speech production of a range of Spanish–English bilinguals: Spanish heritage speakers, English heritage speakers, advanced L2 Spanish learners, and advanced L2 English learners. To answer this question, lexical items with considerable phonological, semantic, and orthographic overlap (cognates) and lexical items with no phonological overlap with their English translation equivalents (non-cognates) were examined. The results indicate that there is a significant effect of cognate status in the Spanish production of VOT by Spanish–English bilinguals. These bilinguals produced /t/ with longer VOT values (more English-like) in the Spanish production of cognates compared to non-cognate words. It is proposed that the exemplar model of lexical representation (Bybee, 2001; Pierrehumbert, 2001) can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections by which cognates facilitate phonetic interference in the bilingual mental lexicon.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: Advanced Students / Bilingual people / Bilingualism / Cognates / Cognitive Processes / Cultural heritage / English / English as a second language learning / French as a second language / Heritage language / Interference (Language) / Language acquisition / Language Dominance / Learning transfer / Linguistics / Mental Lexicon / Monolingualism / Native Language / Onset (Phonology) / Orthography / Phonemics / Phonetics / Phonology / Production / Second Language Learning / Semantics / Spanish / Speaking / Speech / Speech production / Transfer of Training / Translation / Voice Onset Time / Voice onset time (VOT)