Not a start and an end but VOT at two timepoints in the life of a heritage speaker

Abstract

This paper compares the voice onset times (VOT) of one heritage speaker’s Dutch and English stops at two points in their adult life separated by 30 years. Previous research has shown bilinguals exhibit different outcomes in acquiring and maintaining the phonetics of both their languages with some speakers matching the native baseline in both languages and others displaying transfer/interference from one language to the other (Scontras et al. 2015). Further, adult language use can be plastic with some speakers showing more progressive, others more conservative, and others markedly stable language use over time compared to younger generations when experiencing social pressures (Sankoff 2019). The speaker examined here demonstrates both differences from the homeland phonetics of their two languages as well as change between recordings likely due to the social pressure of continued decreasing first language use (community already post-shift at time of first recording). In 1989, the speaker shows Dutch-influenced English VOTs with prevoicing present on the voiced stops and voiceless stops in the short-lag range. However, by 2018, the English VOTs are more homeland-like with no prevoicing and voiceless stops with more aspiration. Their Dutch stops, conversely, start fairly homeland-like in 1989 with consistent prevoicing on voiced stops and short-lag voiceless stops, but the percentage of prevoiced voiced stop tokens decreases and aspiration increases on voiceless stops in 2018. These results concur with previous studies showing cross-language influence and adult language plasticity while also expanding on previous heritage language research by providing a rare, though not first, longitudinal look at how a heritage speaker’s speech has changed over their lifetime.