Voicing patterns in stops among heritage speakers of Western Armenian in Lebanon and the US

Abstract Research on Western Armenian (WA) has described it as having a contrast between voiceless aspirated stops and voiced (Fairbanks 1948; Vaux 1998; Baronian 2017). Since there is no monolingual community of WA, all speakers are part minority language community, also speak the majority language. The current study examines from two heritage communities WA: one in Lebanon, where Arabic, US, English. Lebanon were found to have unaspirated stops, line with Lebanese Arabic. US more variable, some English pattern while others had but their variable unaspirated. These results indicate L2 transfer both communities, leading different patterns voicing WA.