The production of voice onset time (VOT) by English-speaking children in a Japanese immersion program

Abstract

This study analyzed the production of voice onset time (VOT) for /p, t, k/ in Japanese and English by English-speaking children (n = 15) in a Japanese immersion program. The immersion children produced Japanese voiceless stops with significantly longer VOT values than the monolingual Japanese children and the immersion teachers, but they produced them with significantly shorter VOT values than their English VOT. This suggests that the immersion students are making a phonetic distinction in VOT between Japanese and English, though their VOT values are still intermediate, compared with the norms of the monolingual speakers and their immersion teachers. In other words, the immersion children implemented the VOT contrast differently from the model they were exposed to, that is, that of the Japanese English bilingual teachers.