The development of voice onset time in French immersion children

Abstract

This thesis sought to examine the acquisition of French stop consonants assessed through the acoustic measure of voice onset time (VOT) in French immersion students from grades 1, 3, and 5. A speech production and speech perception task were administered in both English and French. Word-initial voiced and voiceless stops were investigated. Production analysis revealed that children maintained two separate language systems in the realization of all voiceless stops and the voiced stop /g/, whereas an interaction between their English and French sound systems was observed in the realization of the voiced stops /b/ and /d/. In the French perception task, children showed consistency in correctly identifying the voiceless tokens but demonstrated difficulty in the identification of the voiced tokens. The results are discussed in terms of the cross-language phonetic differences between English and French, the particularity of the learning environment, and the influence of an English dominant society.