This paper presents findings from an instrumental study of Voice Onset Time (VOT) production in 3 English-Arabic bilingual children and 3 monolingual controls from each language. The subjects were all aged between 5 and 10, and the recordings were made in England and Lebanon. The aim was to find out whether bilinguals acquire separate VOT patterns for each language and whether these patterns are parallel to the monolingual ones. Results showed that the 3 bilinguals did acquire distinct VOT patterns for each language, but the patterns did not always resemble monolingual ones. The main affected feature was voicing lead in Arabic, as it was often replaced with short lag. However, similar behaviour was found in the young monolingual children, which helped interpret some of the bilingual patterns in terms of normal developmental features rather than resorting to the usual explanations based on 'language interference'. Results from both monolinguals and bilinguals showed that the differences between the two languages are finer than the three VOT categories suggest, particularly with respect to short lag. Finally developmental changes for two of the bilingual subjects over a period of 18 months revealed the importance of an interrelation between input and age for the acquisition of two independent phonological systems.

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This paper examines the role that multiple models of English play in the daily interactions of English-Arabic bilingual children growing up in the UK and how these models are harnessed for communicative purposes. Bilingual children are often regularly exposed to standard, nonstandard, and non-native varieties of either of their languages. These varieties constitute the source of phonological knowledge for these children and influence their sociolinguistic development (Khattab 2009). The bilinguals' sociolinguistic competence not only concerns their ability to switch between languages, but also to switch between native and non-native varieties for communicative purposes. To illustrate this behavior we report on convergence and divergence patterns by three English-Arabic bilingual children aged 5, 7, and 10, growing up in Yorkshire, England. The aim is to explore the role of social, contextual, and interactional factors in shaping the bilinguals' English accent and their developing sociophonetic competence. Semi-structured interactions between the children and their mothers are analyzed for language use and within that, for specific phonetic aspects of the children's English accent in English-only and in codeswitched utterances.Results show that the bilinguals' English codeswitches exhibit systematic patterns in their usage of variants from one language or the other, and from one English variety or the other, depending on the communicative situation. This suggests that bilinguals acquire both native (local and supra local) and non-native features of English and seem to harness phonetic detail from these varieties for divergence or convergence strategies. The results also suggest that bilinguals may constantly move between bilingual and monolingual modes during the course of the interaction depending on the needs of the situation.

This paper reports an analysis of /l/ production by English-Arabic bilingual children. It addresses the question of whether the bilingual develops one phonological system or two by calling for a refinement of the notion of a system using insights from recent phonetic and sociolinguistic work on variability in speech. The bilingual subjects that were chosen for the study are three Lebanese children aged 5, 7, and 10, all born and raised in Yorkshire, England. Monolingual friends of the same age were chosen as controls, and the parents of all bilingual and monolingual children were also taped to obtain a detailed assessment of the sound patterns available in the subjects' environment. The bilinguals were taped in different language sessions with different interviewers. /l/ was chosen due to the existence of different patterns for clear and dark variants in its production in English and Arabic that vary according to contextual and dialectal factors. Results show that bilinguals have developed separate/l/ production patterns for each of their languages that are similar to those of monolinguals, and that the interaction between their two languages is restricted to the bilingual mode and is a sign of their sociolinguistic competence.

This study investigates the role of orthography in German vowel production by Polish L1 speakers with German as an L2. Eighteen intermediate to advanced Polish L2 German learners and 20 German native speakers were recorded during a picture-naming task in which half of the experimental items were explicitly marked in their orthographic representation for their vowel length (short or long). Duration measurements revealed that explicit orthographic marking helped the Polish L2 German learners produce the short-long contrast more nativelike. The analysis of vowel quality further showed that (in)congruencies between L1 and L2 grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences may influence L2 vowel production as well. These findings have important implications for models of L2 speech learning and pronunciation training. 1997; Moyer, 1999). One of the greatest challenges for Polish L1 speakers with German as an L2 is the German vowel system (Hentschel, 1986; Hirschfeld, 1998; Morciniec, 1990). In contrast to Polish, which has six vowels and no phonological vowel length contrast, German exhibits a relatively high number of 15 vowel phonemes and makes use of a phonological distinction between long/tense and short/lax vowels (Pompino-Marschall, 2009). This leads to a number of minimal pairs that could potentially cause communication problems for L2 learners of German (e.g., Höhle /høːlə/ "cave" versus Hölle /hoelə/ "hell" or fühlen /fyːlən/ "to feel" versus füllen /fʏlən/ "to fill"). From an orthographic point of view, the long vowels in Höhle and fühlen are explicitly marked for their length by so called Dehnungs-h ("lengthening h"), which is a silent letter and a reliable marker for a preceding vowel to be ON THE ROLE OF ORTHOGRAPHY IN L2 VOWEL PRODUCTION long (Eisenberg, 2013). At the same time, the short vowels in Hölle and füllen are also explicitly marked for their length in that all German vowels which are followed by double consonant letters are short (Ramers, 1999). Since not all short and long vowels are explicitly marked for their length (e.g., Boden /boːdən/ "floor" or Wolke /vɔlkə/ "cloud") 1 , German is an ideal testing ground for the investigation of the effects of orthographic markings on L2 vowel productions. ON THE ROLE OF ORTHOGRAPHY IN L2 VOWEL PRODUCTIONL2 pronunciation researchers and teachers assume that orthographic cues such as lengthening h can help German L2 learners establish different phonetic categories for short and long vowels and hence produce them more native-like (e.g., Dieling, 1983; Dieling & Hirschfeld, 2007). However, experimental evidence to test this assumption is still missing.Furthermore, German and Polish use the same graphemes to represent similar vowel phonemes. Escudero et al. (2014) have shown that the "congruency" between L1 and L2 grapheme-to-phoneme (G-P) correspondences plays an important role in L2 sound perception and can both help and hinder L2 word learning. The influence of (in)congruencies between L1 and L2 G-P mappings might also be relevant for L2 vowel production. Polish L2...

This study investigates medial gemination patterns in Lebanese Arabic (LA). It offers an account of the duration patterns of quantity distinction for vowels and consonants in LA by using the most comprehensive dataset for this variety, and for Arabic in general, so far in terms of the number of speakers (20), the consonant types examined (24), the inspection of vowels preceding and following the consonant in durational analyses, and the inclusion of male and female speakers. The main aim is to show correspondence between phonetic timing in LA and phonological accounts of syllabic structure that are based on moraic weight (Hayes 1989;Broselow 1995;McCarthy and Prince 1995). The study extends predictions of mora-sharing in disyllables with medial clusters that are preceded by a long vowel (e.g., /ˈmaal.ħa/ 'salty-FEM-SG') to comparable syllables with a medial geminate (e.g., /ˈmaal.la/ 'bored-FEM-SG'), which have not been investigated in Arabic before. It shows that vowel shortening preceding medial geminates affects phonologically long but not short vowels, downplaying the commonly referred to closed-syllable shortening effect as the main reason for this phenomenon (Maddieson 1997). Instead, an account based on the interface between phonetic and phonological effects on compensatory vowel shortening offers better predictions.