On the Acquisition of English Voiceless Stop VOT by Indonesian-English Bilinguals: Evidence of Input Frequency

Abstract

The paper attempted to investigate the acquisition of Voice Onset Time (VOT) of voiceless stop consonants of English /p/, /t/, and /k/ by Indonesian-English bilingual children in its close relation to how second language (L2) input shapes the L2 VOT production. It looked at two types of bilingual participants; (1) one 6-year-old participant receiving extensive input of English natives from YouTube in about 8 hours per day since she was two in addition to having an interactive communication in English with her family members (2) four students (aged 7-8 years old) of International Class Program with non-native environment of English. Both groups were residing in Malang, East Java, Indonesia at the time of data collection. The comparative analysis concluded that the VOT valued differ significantly across different inputs. The participants with non native input acquired much shorter VOTs falling within the average of 28 – 36 ms, while the one with native input could achieve native-like VOTs in the average of 69 ms for /p/ and /t/ and even longer for stop consonant /k/. Contributing factors of individual differences might arrive from input frequency levels, types of inputs, and complexities of phonological properties of Indonesian and English.