An acoustic-articulatory study of bilingual vowel production: Advanced tongue root vowels in Twi and tense/lax vowels in Ghanaian English

Abstract

This article investigates the acoustic and articulatory correlates of vowel contrasts in bilingual speakers. We analyse data from bilingual speakers of Twi (Akan) and Ghanaian English, with the aim of examining how the production of the advanced tongue root vowel contrast in Twi relates to the production of the tense/lax vowel contrast in Ghanaian English. These data are compared to tense/lax vowel data from monolingual British English speakers. The acoustic results show that Twi and Ghanaian English mainly rely on F1 for distinguishing [ATR] and [TENSE] vowels, whereas British English uses F1, F2, F3 and duration for the [TENSE] contrast. The ultrasound tongue imaging data show tongue root distinctions across all languages, while there are consistent tongue height distinctions in British English, no height distinctions in Ghanaian English, and small height distinctions for some vowels in Twi. Twi has the weakest correlation between F1 and tongue root advancement, which suggests that the [ATR] contrast may involve additional strategies for pharyngeal cavity expansion that are not present in [TENSE] vowels. In doing so, we show that bilinguals produce similar contrasts in similar ways across their two languages, but that language-specific differences also persist, which may reflect different articulatory goals in each language.

Acquiring allophonic structure and phonetic detail in a bilingual community: The production of laterals by Sylheti-English bilingual children

“…Models of L2 speech perception predict that when an L2 contrast is perceived as similar to an L1 contrast then the L2 phonemes may be assimilated to the corresponding L1 phonemes (Best & Tyler, 2007). The degree of convergence between phonemes is likely to be more pronounced when two languages shared typologically similar systems prior to contact taking place (Mennen, 2004;Amengual & Chamorro, 2015;Kirkham & Nance, 2017), with any convergence hypothesised to result from links between a bilingual's two languages (Flege, 1995). At the same time, there is also evidence that speakers can develop distinct phonetic categories for similar sounds in each language (Sundara, Polka & Baum, 2006), so complete convergence is not inevitable and may depend on various factors.…”

Dynamic acoustic-articulatory relations in back vowel fronting: Examining the effects of coda consonants in two dialects of British English

“…Carignan 2019), in some cases acoustic-articulatory relations can pattern with aspects of linguistic structure. For example, Kirkham and Nance (2017) show that acoustic-articulatory relations can subtly but consistently vary between a bilingual's two languages, even when there are strong phonological correspondences between languages. For this reason, our study adds an additional dimension of variability by examining acoustic-articulatory relations between two dialects of British English, which we review in greater detail below.…”

The Effects of Home Language and Bilingualism on the Realization of Lexical Stress in Welsh and Welsh English

“…Studies of contact varieties have documented many cases where the sound systems of languages in contact have become, or are becoming, more similar to one another (Campbell and Muntzel, 1989;Heselwood and McChrystal, 1999;Bullock and Gerfen, 2004;Colantoni and Gurlekian, 2004;Louden and Page, 2005;Chang, 2009;Heeringa et al, 2015;Kirkham and Nance, 2017;Schoormann et al, 2017). Although any aspect of the sound system -including its prosody -can show convergence (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988;Winford, 2003), most studies have focused on segmental changes.…”