Abstract
This study assesses the effects of age and language exposure on VOT production in 29 simultaneous bilingual children aged 3;7 to 5;11 who speak German as a heritage language in the Netherlands. Dutch and German have a binary voicing contrast, but the contrast is implemented with different VOT values in the two languages. The results suggest that bilingual children produce ‘voiced’ plosives similarly in their two languages, and these productions are not monolingual-like in either language. Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence between Dutch and German can explain these results. Yet, the bilinguals seemingly have two autonomous categories for Dutch and German ‘voiceless’ plosives. In German, the bilinguals’ aspiration is not monolingual-like, but bilinguals with more heritage language exposure produce more target-like aspiration. Importantly, the amount of exposure to German has no effect on the majority language's ‘voiceless’ category. This implies that more heritage language exposure is associated with more language-specific voicing systems.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 598-617 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Bilingualism |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - May 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright Cambridge University Press 2017. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.Keywords
- child bilingualism
- language exposure
- heritage language
- voice onset time (VOT)
- cross-linguistic influence