Crosslinguistic Influence on VOT Spectrum: A comparative study on English, Mandarin and Min

Crosslinguistic Influence on VOT Spectrum: A Comparative Study on English, Mandarin and Min Jarry Chia-Wei Chuang Department of English National Chengchi University Taipei, Taiwan cwchuang.academia@gmail.com ORCID: 0000-0002-3029-4463 Abstract Crosslinguistic comparison of VOT has indicated linguistic transfer of voicing and aspiration contrasts in many languages. Mandarin has clear aspiration contrasts for voiceless stops, while Min presents another complicated VOT pattern, where voicing and aspiration contrasts are involved. The present study makes a crosslinguistic comparison between languages with voicing and aspiration contrasts as well as the potential linguistic transfer of VOT in English contexts from Mandarin and Min. There are three subject groups, including American English natives and Mandarin-Min bilinguals with different levels of Min-fluency. Mandarin-Min bilinguals have more aspirations and higher VOTs for aspirated voiceless stops than English natives. They also present two surfaces for English underlying voiced stops, voiced and unaspirated voiceless. Different levels of Min fluency are found to influence the tendencies towards voiced or unaspirated voiceless representations of English voiced stops. The overall finding presents a clear crosslinguistic influence on VOT patterns. Keywords: Voice onset time (VOT), crosslinguistic, English, Mandarin, Min. 1 Introduction Researchers have been long explored phonetic and phonological acquisition in Mandarin-speaking ESL and EFL contexts (Chao & Chen, 2008; Chuang, 2021; Liu, 2017; among others). In Taiwan, Mandarin is the dominant language and English is the first foreign language, which has been taught from primary education to tertiary education. Taiwan EFL learners have been reported to have several phenomena of linguistic transfer from Mandarin to English, one of which is concerned with voicing contrast in stops. Previous studies on crosslinguistic influence have only taken Mandarin as the primary variable (Chao & Chen, 2008), while Crosslinguistic influences should be carefully noted. Taiwan is a multilingual community and most of the Taiwanese people are at least bilingual, though their L2 fluency may, subtly or divergently, differ from one to another. In Taiwan they are likely to acquire Min, Haka, or Austronesian languages; among all, Mandarin-Min bilinguals is the majority. To better capture the linguistic transfer of VOT, the paper will take different linguistic backgrounds and experiences (especially Mandarin-Min bilingualism) into account, revisiting crosslinguistic influences on VOTs in Taiwan English contexts via acoustic analysis. 2 Literature Review 2.1 VOT Voice onset time (VOT) has led to phonetic studies in a vast number of languages. VOT marks the release of obstruction as well as reflects laryngeal vibration. Though its reliability for voicing distinction has been doubted in intervocalic or word-final positions (Docherty, 2011), it is still convincing that VOT can help identify voicing contrast in syllable-initial positions. VOTs show a categorical pattern for voicing and aspiration contrasts, in which VOT patterns can be classified into three possibilities (Lisker & Abramson, 1964), as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. Phonetic VOT patterns of plosives The three-way distinction includes: (1) negative VOT (long lead), in which vocal folds vibrate far prior to the release of obstruction; (2) zero VOT (short lag), in which laryngeal vibration almost coincides with the unblocking of …

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