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.