PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF A VOICING CONTRAST BY FRENCH-ENGLISH BILINGUALS

The use of spectral information at vowel onset, which constitutes a stronger cue to the voicing contrast in English than in French, was investigated in French-English bilinguals in order to determine whether the primary language in terms of early experience determines acoustic cue weighting. The /pEn/-/bEn/ minimal pair, meaningful in both languages, was used as a base for identification tests, which were presented with either an English or a French precursor word before each token. Two stimulus continua, formed of digitally-edited natural speech tokens, had an identical VOT range but varied in their [En] stem. In their production of the contrast, bilinguals showed clear evidence of code-switching but did not always produce monolingual-like VOTs in their weaker language. In perception, the code-switching effect was significant but small. The bilingual group with English as primary early language showed a greater effect of vowel onset characteristics, in conflicting-cue conditions, than the bilingual group with French as their primary early language, and, on average, cue-weighting was not affected by the language of the precursor. An effect of language dominance on cue-weighting was therefore found.