An Acoustic Phonetic Analysis of Word-Initial Stop Production by Young Simultaneous Mandarin- English Bilingual Children

Abstract

This study examined bilinguals’ acquisition of subphonemic features in English and Mandarin to investigate whether and how their two languages are differentiated and at what linguistic level. The production of wordinitial voiceless stops (/p t k/) by two Mandarin-English bilingual children was analyzed for the measure of voice onset time (VOT), which shows a substantial overlap in two languages. Both children produced English and