Stop consonant production by French-English bilingual children in Southern Alberta

Although Canada has two official languages, French and English, it is well-known that these languages are not used equally across the country. Quebec is French-dominant, with nearly 8 out of 10 people reporting French as their native language compared to 8.3% who are native Anglophones (Statistics Canada, 2012b). In Alberta, English is the mother tongue of 77.0% of residents, with native Francophones making up only 1.9% of the population (Statistics Canada 2012a). While quite a few studies have investigated French-English bilingualism in Francophone Canada (e.g. Caramazza et al., 1973; Fowler et al., 2008; MacLeod & Stoel-Gammon, 2008), there exists a dearth of research on this topic in Western Canada where the sociolinguistic context is the reverse. We are interested in exploring how the differing social context might impact French-English speaking children’s speech production. Thus, our study is set within the city of Lethbridge in southern Alberta—where the native French population is only 0.9% (Statistics Canada, 2012a). Official language status has helped maintain Franco-Albertan culture in the region, however, and the city boasts a French public library, community centre, and K-12 school, among other services. (ACFA regionale de Lethbridge Medicine Hat, n.d.). The present study examines French and English speech sound production in 10 grade five students attending a Francophone school in Lethbridge using analysis of voice onset time (VOT). VOT is an acoustic parameter that measures the time lapse between stop consonant release and the voice onset of the following vowel (Lisker & Abramson, 1964). English and French both have distinct stop consonant sets that can be measured and compared using VOT: the voiced /b/, /d/, and /g/, and the voiceless /p, /t/, and /k/. Monolingual Englishand French-speakers differ in VOT measures reported for both sets, with Anglophones producing long-lag VOT (>30 ms) for voiceless stops and short-lag VOT for voiced stops (<30 ms) (Docherty, 1992). By contrast, Francophones’ voiceless stops are in the short-lag VOT range, while their voiced stops exhibit negative VOT values indicative of glottal action preceding the stop burst (i.e., prevoicing) (Ryalls & Larouche, 1992). FrenchEnglish bilinguals, who are the focus of this study, often exhibit different VOT patterns altogether. For example, Flege (1987) demonstrated that the English voiceless /t/ is shorter (i.e., more French-sounding) in native English-speakers who have learned French. Moreover, Fowler et al. (2008) found that adults who learned both French and English before age 3 present voiceless VOT values in both languages that are influenced bidirectionally. In other words, each language system is influenced by the other even though a clear distinction is made between the two. Bidirectional language influence has also been demonstrated in early Korean-English bilinguals (Baker & Trofimovich, 2005). To our knowledge, no previous study has employed VOT to study speech sound production in Albertan Frenchspeaking children. Our research seeks (1) to determine how the VOT patterns of French-speaking children in Anglo-dominant Lethbridge compare to those of native Quebecois and monolingual English speakers and (2) if they have developed separate language systems for English and French.