Gestural drift in a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and English.

Number 1070
Year 1997
Drawer 20
Entry Date 06/26/1998
Authors Sancier, Michele L, and Fowler, Carol A.
Contact
Publication Journal of Phonetics, 25, 1997, 421-436.
url http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL1070.pdf
Abstract We report three experiments exploring the occurrence of perceptually-guided changes in speech production by a speaker well past the critical period for language acquisition. A first experiment shows that listeners sharing our speaker’s native language (Brazilian Portuguese) can distinguish her productions in that language as having been produced either after recent experience in Brazil or after recent experience producing and listening to English in the United States. In contrast, native English speaking listeners cannot distinguish our speaker’s English productions by recent experience. Acoustic measurements of our speaker’s voiceless stops produced in both Brazilian Portuguese and English show that, whereas her VOTs are always shorter for productions in Brazilian Portuguese than in English, VOTs of stops produced in both languages are shorter after a several month stay in Brazil than after a several month stay in the United States. We offer a theoretical account of the findings.
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