VOT production by Spanish heritage speakers in a trilingual context

ABSTRACT

In several studies it is highlighted that the early acquisition of a language in the home results in phonetic and phonological benefits, and that it is not uncommon for early learners to achieve native-like pronunciation in their heritage language. However, most of these studies have been carried out with bilinguals. The present contribution aims at extending the research focus to trilingual teens, and more specifically to Spanish heritage speakers (HSs), schooled mainly in English, and taking part in a French immersion programme. How do they manage the task of learning a third phonological system? We set out to explore whether and to what extent these sequential trilinguals can produce native-like speech in all of their languages. To this end, we recorded a group of Spanish HSs while completing three picture-naming tasks (in English, Spanish, and French), which led to the production of monosyllabic and disyllabic words with a voiceless stop in stressed onset position. Our results show that they tend to produce monolingual-like stops in their dominant languages, Spanish and English, but seem to fail to do so in French. In our discussion, we resort to language dominance and context of acquisition to shed light on our findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Heritage language phonology
• third language phonology
• VOT

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mtra. Teresa Espin for welcoming us into the community school Expandiendo Horizontes. We are also very grateful to all of our participants and their parents for their selfless contribution to this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Note that no variety of Spanish is specified at this point because it varies from one participant to another, as will become evident in the section devoted to describing our groups.

2. Data were collected in the city of Ottawa, in the province of Ontario. Although this city enjoys bilingual status and is in very close proximity to the province of Quebec, it is possible, like in many parts of Ontario and in other English-dominant Canadian provinces, to fully live in English. Exposure to and use of French are not a guaranteed part of daily life and may vary greatly from Ottawan to Ottawan.

3. In many parts of Quebec, English is mainly a subject matter, and it is possible to fully live in French without using and hardly ever being exposed to English outside the classroom. This is the case for our French control group. Although they have reported a higher proficiency in English than our Spanish monolinguals, participants in both control groups lead monolingual lives, and their contact with English is limited to a few hours a week at school.

4. The number of participants in all groups is lower than desired for several reasons. Firstly, not all heritage speakers we had access to spoke mainly Spanish at home and, more crucially, some of them were not enrolled in French immersion. Thus, only seven met all the required criteria. Secondly, many of our participants’ classmates spoke heritage languages, and could not be included in our bilingual control group. Lastly, not all potential participants were available for testing and/or obtained parental consent.