A case study of portuguese and English bilinguality

1. Background This study of the acoustic characteristics of European Portuguese and British English fricatives as produced by two bilingual subjects, consisted of time and frequency analysis of words in a carrier sentence. Time-averaged power spectra were calculated and parameterised in order to aid comparisons across speaker, across corpus, and across language, and to gain insight into the production mechanisms underlying the language-specific variations. Previous acoustic phonetic studies of bilingual speech have been mainly focused on categorical perception of plosives. Spanish and English VOTs and voicing perception of Spanish and English differed [Abramson and Lisker (1973), Williams (1977), Bond et al. (1980), Konefal and Fokes (1981)]. French and English French and English monolingual speakers have different VOTs; bilinguals use an “intermediate” voicing contrast [Caramazza et al. (1973)]. Two voicing cues were observed, overall duration of voicing in French VCVs and length of English vowels. Only marginal differences between monolinguals and bilinguals [Watson (1990)]. French-English bilinguals did not always produce monolingual-like VOTs [Hazan and Boulakia (1993)]. !