Preliminary report : an acoustic phonetic analysis of word-initial stop production by young simultaneous Mandarin-English bilingual children

This study examined bilinguals' acquisition of subphonemic features in English and Mandarin to investigate whether and how their two languages are differentiated and at what linguistic level. The production of word-initial voiceless stops (/p t k/) by two Mandarin-English bilingual children was analysed for the measure of voice onset time (VOT), which shows a substantial overlap in two languages. Both children produced English and Mandarin stops with VOTs that fell in the long-lag region (>70 ms). However, there were variations between the two speakers and across the three stops: both children showed similar VOT values for /t/ and /k/, but opposite patterns in VOT for /p/ in English and Mandarin. These results suggest that bilingual children may acquire phonemes with similar phonetic features differently, lending support to the argument that bilinguals may differentiate the production of their two languages at the phonetic level from an early age.